The State as Grover Dill
Two decades before The Christmas Story, I entered the world of Jean Shepherd's imagination.
I spent two semesters at Westminster seminary in Philadelphia. Philadelphia was within the range of WOR in New York City. Every week night, beginning at 10:15, I would listen for 45 minutes to Jean Shepherd's monologue. Those were the most imaginatively creative 45 minutes that ever went out nightly over the airwaves. I don't know how he did it.
We would not get a nightly story about northern Indiana in the 1930's, but we would get one often enough to make it worth listening to the show every evening, just in case. It was then that I entered the world of Flick, Schwartz, Miss Shields, the Old Man, and those two malevolent trolls, Scut Farkas and Grover Dill.
As most Americans remember from The Christmas Story, Grover Dill was a toady. Whatever influence he had, it was entirely dependent upon his association with Farkas. Farkas had power; Grover Dill also had power, but only as a subordinate.
The world always has plenty of Grover Dills. The number of Scut Farkases is not nearly so great. There is a Pareto distribution of bullies.
THE BULLY THEORY OF THE STATE
There are lots of theories of the origin of civil government. Mine is very simple. I believe in the bully theory of civil government. I don't believe there was any social contract between citizens and rulers. But there were always bullies. There will always be some guy who likes to push other people around. He will attract people who also like to push other people around, but at reduced risk. They need a bigger bully to back them up.
Civil government is an operation like a gang, but it has legitimacy. People put up with government bullies because of the rules that have been worked out between the bullies and the citizens. Citizens want predictability in their lives. They do not want bullies with arbitrary power interfering in their lives. When they are walking home from school, they do not want to be challenged by Scut Farkas and Grover Dill. So, they work out an arrangement. Scut Farkas gets a percentage of people's lunch money, but he doesn't get all of it. He gets it on a predictable basis. He shares some of it with Grover Dill.
To protect their turf, Farkas and Dill must fend off rival predators, who would otherwise take some of the victims' lunch money. To gain predictability, the victims consent. In the private sector, this is called protection money. In the realm of civil government, it is called taxation. As long as Farkas and Dill police the turf effectively, and as long as they do not extract too much money, or humiliate the victims beyond acceptable limits, their victims do not revolt.
As the free market continues to expand, the federal government gets close to the same percentage in revenues that it did before -- about 20% of GDP. It runs up enormous debts, however, because the Farkases of the world never have enough money to keep them happy. They always want more. The bankers, whether commercial or central, offer them money in advance, but always in terms of a promise, namely, that they will return this money with interest.
Governments run up the bills, but they find themselves incapable of extracting enough lunch money from their victims to keep borrowing. At some point, they default.
As the free market expands, individuals gain greater power than before. They gain the ability to cooperate with each other. They gain the ability to resist the extension of further government tyranny. Decentralization favors resistance. It does not favor the central government.
VAN VOGT
I never liked A. E. Van Vogt's books. Artistically speaking, I just didn't think he was worth reading. He was no Ray Bradbury. He was no Ted Sturgeon. (Sturgeon was the source of Sturgeon's law, which is the only serious challenge to Pareto's 20-80 law: "Ninety percent of everything is crap.") But I must admit that I did read Van Vogt's book, The Weapon Shops of Isher, very early in my life. I was maybe 13 years old. Wikipedia summarizes.
The Isher/Weapon Shops novels are very rare examples of Golden Age science fiction that explicitly discuss the right to keep and bear arms, specifically guns. Indeed, the motto of the Weapon Shops, repeated several times, is "The right to buy weapons is the right to be free". Van Vogt's guns have virtually magical properties, and can only be used in self-defense.The political philosophy of the Weapon Shops is minimalist. They will not interfere with the corrupt imperial monarchy of the Isher government, on the grounds that men always have a government of the type they deserve: no government, however bad, exists without at least the tacit consent of the governed. The mission of the Weapon Shops therefore is merely to offer single individuals the right to protect themselves with a firearm, or, in cases of fraud, access to a "Robin Hood" alternative court system that judges and awards compensation from large, imperial merchant combines to cheated individuals. Because the population has access to this alternative system of justice, the Isher government cannot take the final step toward totalitarianism.
The two great science fiction books of the 20th century in terms of their impact on people's thinking were George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four and Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. As it has turned out, Van Vogt had it right, and they had it wrong.
Technology is on the side of the little guy. Technology is ultimately going to make it possible for the little guy to become a manufacturer of weapons. There is no doubt in my mind that governments hate the right to keep and bear arms more than they hate any other aspect of society, not because everybody is going to carry a weapon in order to shoot a government agent, but because the right to own weapons is the consummate right to defend your liberty and your property. It is the inherent right of free men to maintain an area of authority against other individuals who invade their area of lawful jurisdiction, and ultimately against the government. This right requires decentralized technologies to back it up.
A man who carries a weapon and knows how to use it is dangerous to anyone with an inner Scut Farkas.
The right to carry a gun is symbolic. It is symbolic of zones of jurisdiction that do not belong to the state. I have made it clear in my writings that I think anybody who pulls a gun on a government agent is a fool. But the ability to point a smart phone in the direction of a government agent who carries a gun is of enormous value for liberty. It is the weapon of bureaucratic destruction. The fact that we live in a world where Grover Dills carry firearms and wear badges is neither here nor there. We have always lived in such a world. What is different today is the smart phone and YouTube.
Scut Farkas wants our lunch money. But if Grover Dill is making people mad, Farkas has a problem. He is going to get resistance when he tries to collect a larger percentage of our lunch money. Meanwhile, he is going into debt rapidly. He needs more of our lunch money, and Grover Dill is interfering with the collection process.
SCUT FARKAS, R.I.P.
Hitler died in 1945. Stalin died in 1953. Mao died in 1976. In terms of their control over the affairs of man, these three tyrants were the supreme examples in the modern world. Nobody with this degree of power came to power in a large nation in the second half of the 20th century. There were dictators who had enormous power over small populations of technologically backward people, or people who had fallen under Joseph Stalin, and who had not yet begun the process of re-conquest. There was Pol Pot. There was Nicolae Ceausescu. These were basically a bunch of Grover Dills, but they became Scut Farkases because their Grover Dills had access to older technologies of oppression. Those under them had not yet gained access to the equivalent of the Saturday night special. There is simply no possibility anymore for the rise of another 20th century-type Scut Farkas on the world scene. States are too heavily in debt. The technologies of resistance are too widely distributed. The price of these technologies keeps dropping.
The quality of the employees inside civil governments around the world continues to decline, when compared with the quality of employees in the private sector, and especially the profit-seeking sector.
Any would-be Scut Farkas today is simply a Grover Dill who has survived the screening process of the state.
Conservatives today seem terrified of Hillary Clinton. Give me a break! And who is the fallback prospect? Joe Biden. Give me another break!
Barack Obama is Grover Dill with a teleprompter. Hillary Clinton is Grover Dill in drag. Joe Biden really is Grover Dill. But he needs Scut Farkas in order to function.
That scraping sound you hear is the bottom of the barrel.
If Hillary Clinton is the best and brightest that the political Left can throw up, we're about to enter the promised land. Hillary Clinton is no Franklin Roosevelt. She is no Lyndon Johnson. They did not keep changing their hairstyles in a never-ending quest to reflect their true identities. There is no collection of Google images for their hairstyles. There is for Mrs. Clinton. Click here.
THE DIGITAL GAP
The American public really doesn't care very much about the NSA and its computer systems. The American public is correct in its assessment. The NSA has powerful computers, but Moore's law operates in the microcomputer world at a faster rate than in the world of supercomputers. Yes, supercomputers get ever more powerful. But in terms of total computing power, microcomputers, when coordinated through the Internet, vastly outpace anything the government has or will ever have. No committee with a supercomputer can match the knowledge of the decentralized social order. The World Wide Web makes available decentralized knowledge together as never before.
Metcalfe's law is dominant. Wikipedia summarizes.
Metcalfe's law states that the value of a telecommunications network is proportional to the square of the number of connected users of the system (n2). First formulated in this form by George Gilder in 1993, and attributed to Robert Metcalfe in regard to Ethernet, Metcalfe's law was originally presented, circa 1980, not in terms of users, but rather of "compatible communicating devices" (for example, fax machines, telephones, etc). Only more recently with the launch of the Internet did this law carry over to users and networks as its original intent was to describe Ethernet purchases and connections.
The gap between what the government has in supercomputers and what the public has in smartphones grows larger every day. It will continue to grow larger. Moore's law favors the little guy. Moore's law, which says that chip capacity increases twofold every year or so, guarantees that the federal government will always fall behind. Metcalfe's law puts Moore's law on steroids.
It doesn't matter what the NSA does. What matters is what the IRS does. The IRS operates computers that are incredibly old. They do function, and eventually you get caught. The technology of surveillance that the government can use against any individual does increase, but what increases even faster are Western governments' debts. This is going to break the hammerlocks of the Grover Dills of the world.
The federal government's debt is now becoming exponential. The IRS is ponderous. By the time the IRS collects from a taxpayer who is cheating, the debt has multiplied. The time lag is now too great to be overcome by the IRS. The next recession will widen this time gap between the federal government's outgo and income.
The elephant cannot stomp the ants into oblivion. The ants can fight back. They do fight back. The federal government has not increased the percentage of GDP it extracts in taxes since 1945. The lenders supply the missing funds. This will not go on much longer. Then the Federal Reserve System will have to fish or cut bait. I think it will cut bait. It will not adopt hyperinflation. It will finally say to the Treasury: "You're on your own."
CONCLUSION
We have entered the world of Van Vogt, not Orwell. I think we entered it back around 1996, when the World Wide Web began to take root in the Internet.
We are not going to see another Scut Farkas. Mao was the last of them. He got his start in the 1920's. There will only be Scut Farkas wannabes: Grover Dills with pretensions.
My favorite scene in The Christmas Story is when Ralphie finally loses self-control. Enraged by Farkas's tauntings, he attacks him, knocks him to the ground, and begins pounding him mercilessly, all the while spewing out a stream of expletives that he got from the Old Man. That was the day of reckoning for Scut Farkas. It was also the day of reckoning for Grover Dill. Dill did not come to the aid of Farkas. He knew better. Grover Dills prefer safety to courage. Risk accompanies courage.
If you want the symbolism of the day of reckoning in modern politics, think "Nicolae Ceausescu."
A group of Grover Dills shot his eye out. On Christmas.