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Review So Far |
This Review may be useful as an overview of where we've been so far in TOLFA - especially after completing Segment 13, on Health & Drugs, which is the 8th of 8 that compare particular things government does, with how a free market would (and will) perform them.
TOLFA's foundation was laid in Segment 1. There, we saw how without any doubt, human beings have the innate right to own and operate our own lives. That's our fundamental axiom. Then Segment 2 showed what government is, and therefore how it is always and inevitably incompatible with that human nature. Then we saw what a free market is, and after a necessary excursion into ethics and religion we began this series of eight.
In one sense they were all superfluous! - for having understood that government violates human nature in all it does, all it does is bound to produce discord and chaos! Of course! Even so, it may have been useful to prove that point (that garbage-in always produces garbage-out) in detail. Let's look back at the eight now, to see that proof on a single page.
Segment 6, Justice made it "abundantly clear that the government 'justice' monopoly has little to do with real justice at all; it is a monstrous offense to any decent person's sense of what is right and wrong" and identified the key components of any system of justice (restoring damaged rights, correcting wrongs) and showed that the government monopoly fails to perform a single one of them because its basic "inputs", or incentives, steer it towards an entirely different agenda; garbage in, garbage out. It also showed that government uses "justice" to varnish over the sordid truth that its system really consists of a way of enforcing its will over the population.
Segment 7, Tax & Spend showed that most of the money passing through government hands goes to buy favors for probable supporters at the next election; a massive scheme of forced redistribution. It also showed how wealth would be distributed in a free-market society: that those who best satisfy the needs and wants of other people will earn the highest reward.
Segment 8, The Environment showed that the term "public property" is an oxymoron - that its use in farming dries up the food supply and its use elsewhere wreaks havoc with forest and atmosphere. The Segment also showed that government control over pollution is a disaster for the environment - that indeed government itself is the prime polluter! - and that only the universal private ownership of property, that a free market provides, is fitted to the task of protecting it for future generations.
Segment 9, Borders proved that borders do not exist in reality - amounting only to limits on the claimed jurisdiction of competing gangs of government thugs - and that if "the prime purpose of any government is to secure the borders" then governments have no valid, prime purpose! It suggested also how a free society with universal ownership of real property might deal with visitors, and demolished the myth that immigrants are somehow harmful.
Segment 10, War & Defense exposed the absolute lie that governments exist to "defend" their subjects, and proved that instead they exist only to enjoy the exercise of power and engage frequently in offensive war to better secure that power; that "war is the health of the State" - states being no more than monstrous killing machines. The Segment proposed that if humanity is to survive war must be abolished, and that the only way to abolish war is to abolish government in favor of a peaceful, free-market society.
Segment 11, Money noted that money is the essential ingredient of all economic activity, explained what it actually is, and showed that governments do their utmost to destroy it - substituting a form that they can manipulate at will, the better to control every aspect of their subjects' daily lives. It predicted that the coming free market will probably choose gold as its primary form of money, and explained why that is so very suitable.
Segment 12, Education detailed how government schools were foisted on Americans by coordinated political action without any popular demand, and how they have all but destroyed real education, instead serving as a way for government to indoctrinate each rising generation. It also showed what real education is, and why a free market would have it in abundance.
Segment 13, Health & Drugs showed how a good, inexpensive health care system operating broadly on free-market principles has in a hundred years been systematically damaged by government intrusion - by distorting the whole nature and purpose of insurance, and by over-ruling the patient's sovereign right to decide about his own treatment - despite a thousand years of precedent that say central control is a sure way to prevent progress. The result now is a system of declining quality and escalating cost.
These eight major functions are the most central to all government activities and "justification" and from them you learned that they are actually performed not just badly (as if by a few unfortunate mistakes) but with consistent and malevolent inversion of what ought to result; this is often called the "180o phenomenon" in which government actually produces the opposite of what it promises.
They therefore serve as proof of the reasoning in Segment 2, that government in its very nature is wholly incompatible with that self-owning nature of human beings; Segment 2 proved it in theory, and Segments 6 through 13 have proven that in practice too "garbage in" results inexorably in "garbage out."
There is, accordingly, no rational alternative to a free market.