A Great Christmas Season Rant Against the Unfairness of the State. (Warning! NSFW!)

Clark Bianco at Popehat has a
bracing holiday rant against the state with the NSFW title
“Burn the Fucking System to the Ground.”

It’s interesting in how it brings white-hot heat against the
practices of the state without coming from an explicitly
libertarian perspective about things like when and where it is
appropriate for the state to act. There’s no big controversial
political philosophical premises or reasoning involved.

It’s just pointing out–in ways that people who think of
themselves as “left” or “right” should be able to
understand–that the state acts in many ways to perform utterly
unconscionable acts that ruin people’s lives for no good
reason–and does so in a way that can seem more based on class
divisions than any “state vs. people’s rights” calculus that has
anything to do with beliefs in the necessity or propriety of
government.

Some excerpts:

The older I get, the more I see, the more I read, the more clear
it becomes to me that the entire game is rigged. The leftists and
the rightists each see half of the fraud. The lefties correctly
note that a poor kid caught with cocaine goes to jail, while a Bush
can write it off as a youthful mistake (they somehow overlook the
fact that their man Barrack hasn’t granted clemency to any one of
the people doing federal time for the same felonies he committed).
The righties note that government subsidized windmills kill
protected eagles with impunity while Joe Sixpack would be deep in
the crap if he even picked up a dead eagle from the side of the
road. The lefties note that no one was prosecuted over the
financial meltdown. The righties note that the Obama administration
rewrote bankruptcy law on the fly to loot value from GM
stockholders and hand it to the unions. The lefties note that
Republicans tweak export rules to give big corporations subsidies.
Every now and then both sides join together to note that, hey! the
government is spying on every one of us…or that, hey! the
government stole a bunch of people’s houses and gave them
to Pfizer,
because a privately owned for-profit corporation is apparently what
the Constitution means by “public use”.

….the system is not reformable. There are multiple classes of
people, but it boils down to the connected, and the not connected.
Just as in pre-Revolutionary France, there is a very strict class
hierarchy….

Jamal the $5 weed slinger, Shaneekwa the hair braider, and
Loudmouth Bob in the 7-11 parking lot are at the bottom of the
hierarchy. They can,literally, be killed with impunity …
as long as the dash cam isn’t running. And, hell, half the time
they can be killed even if the dash
cam is running….

Next up from Shaneekwa and Loudmouth Bob are us regular peons.
We can have our balls squeezed at the airport, our rectums explored
at the roadside, our cars searched because the cops got permission
from a dog (I owe some Reason intern a drink for that one), our
telephones tapped (because terrorism!), our bank accounts
investigated (because FinCEN! and no expectation of privacy!). We
don’t own the house we live in, not if someone of a higher social
class wants it….And if there’s a “national security emergency”
(defined as two idiots with a pressure cooker), then the
constitution is suspended, martial law is declared, and people are
hauled out of their homes.

Next up from the regular peons are the unionized,
disciplined-voting-blocks. Not-much-brighter-than-a-box-of-crayolas
teachers who work 180 days a year and get automatic raises.
Firefighters who disproportionately retire on disability the very
day they sub in for their bosses and get a paper cut.

A step up from the teachers and firefighters are the cops: all
the same advantages of nobility of the previous group, but a few
more in addition: the de facto power to murder someone as long as
not too many cameras are rolling….

Above the cops, the prosecutors, and the judiciary we have the
true ruling class: the cabal of (most) politicians and (some) CEOs,
conspiring both against their own competitors and the public at
large. If the public is burdened with a $100 million debt to pay
off a money losing stadium, that’s a small price to pay if a
politician gets reelected (and gets to hobnob with entertainers and
sports heroes via free tickets and backstage passes)….

It is corrupt, corrupt, corrupt….

The system is not fixable because it is not broken. It
is working, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year,
to give the insiders their royal prerogatives….

Burn it to the ground.

Burn it to the ground.

Again, a kind of anger that theoretically could fuel a genuinely
“populist libertarianism” without explicitly libertarian roots.
Interesting to think about.

[Hat tip: the Twitter feed of magazine editor and TV talk show
host Matt Welch]