The State and the Mafia
I live in Durham County (NC), right next door to Wake County, which is in the midst of a heated debate over its notorious forced busing program that the new school board just declared its intention to end (they've been assigning children still trapped in the government school system to schools very far from their homes in order to achieve a "diversity" goal of no school having more than 40% of the children in the free or reduced lunch program--the result is lots of parents who otherwise would have had their kids in the local neighborhood school and who now have a much greater difficulty staying involved in their children's education while the kids spend hours each day on the bus, sometimes force to go out to the bus stop before sunrise). I've been having a tough time, in a particular discussion forum, trying to explain the injustice of such a program to some statists, who already don't understand the injustice of the government education system in the first place. My latest attempt is to compare the State to the Mafia, along the lines of thinkers like Spooner and Rothbard. After I typed it up I decided it would make a good blog post, so here's what I posted in the forum (for clarification, my use of the phrase "propaganda language" is a reference to the use of that phrase by one of the statists in response to another libertarian's referring to taxation as theft):
Here's maybe a different way of looking at this busing issue (and really any issue involving compulsory government). Imagine it's not the government that comes around to take some of your money to fund schools, but rather a Mafia enforcer. Imagine it's not the government that threatens to lock you up if you don't send your kids to school, but rather the Mafia enforcer. Imagine it's not the government that then makes it harder for you to be involved in your children's education by sending them to a school across town that you otherwise wouldn't have chosen, but rather your friendly Mafia enforcer. Now, what we call theft (or armed robbery if you refuse to send in the money on your own), kidnapping, and general aggression when the Mafia does it, we call 'democracy at work for the public good' or some other such *ahem* propaganda language when the state does it.
Ah, you say, but it's okay when the state engages in this kind of violence because "we're a democracy" and "we can vote for our leaders." Okay, then--let's say the Mafia comes along and says, "You can vote for which Mafiosi you want to do the hiring of the enforcers! Woohoo! We won't let you out of the violence we're initiating, but YOU get to tell us who you want holding the gun! Aren't we nice?"
Ah, you say, but it's not really like that with the state because we're all part of the "social contract" that allows the state its monopoly on justice and the legal initiation of violence. Well, alrighty--so the Mafia comes back and says, "Hey, whatcha fussin' for, guy? Don't you know what we're doing is okay because of this special "social contract" we just came up with that we say you're agreeing to?"
So here's the deal. The difference--the SOLE difference--between the Mafia and the state is that the state has managed, through nonsense logic and "propaganda language," to convince enough of you terrified children of its legitimacy that you allow it to go about its business of aggression without too much resistance.
Ending the busing program is a reduction in the level of aggression involved in education, a smaller reduction for some and a greater reduction for others.
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