Lindsay Perigo
The Politically Incorrect Show - 03/07/2001
[Music - Die Fledermaus]
Good afternoon, Kaya Oraaa & welcome to the Politically Incorrect Show on the free speech network, Radio Pacific, for Tuesday July 3, proudly sponsored by Neanderton Nicotine Ltd., the show that says bugger the politicians & bureaucrats & all the other bossyboot busybodies who try to run our lives with our money; that stands tall for free enterprise, achievement, profit, & excellence, against the state-worshippers in our midst; that stands above all for the most sacred thing in the universe, the liberty of the human individual.
[Music up, music down!]
I enjoyed yesterday's discussion immensely. I enjoy it when people raise "big picture" issues. I don't enjoy it when they ring to complain about their washing machine or seek help with the crossword, though I was happy to bring peace of mind to the last agitated soul who did the latter. Yesterday a caller came at me with a "big picture" double-whammy: how could I deny the existence of God when the universe is so perfectly designed, & what would happen to invalid orphans in the free society I advocate?
Though the questions appear to be wildly different, they are suffused with the same leitmotif: a belief in the desirability of surrendering one's own autonomy to an external authority - an imaginary God in one case & the state in the other. If a mind immeasurably superior to ours created the universe, & that mind laid down some rules for us, then we must defer to that mind & obey those rules unquestioningly, whatever our own judgement may tell us. If no guarantee can be provided that some individuals in a free society will take care of orphaned invalids, then ALL individuals should be FORCED to take care of them by the government. And there is a link between the two propositions - the latter, in the eyes of many of its advocates, is "God's will" (somehow overlooking the fact that no one held a gun to the head of the Good Samaritan).
Now I'm not going to repeat the answers I gave to those questions yesterday. I DO, however, want to repeat an observation I made in response to a subsequent caller who claimed that SO MANY people were incapable of running their own lives that there is no alternative to government force. That observation is: if so many people are hopeless & helpless, what makes politicians & bureaucrats so special? People who ARE able to run their own lives get on with it, to the extent that they're permitted; they don't seek vicarious kicks out of running other people's. That means that the politicians & bureaucrats must come from the ranks of those NOT able to run their own lives. What, then, gives them the wisdom, let alone the right, to run others'? And even if some of them had such wisdom, how could the rest of us, being stupid & helpless, select them?
A Green supporter once told me she had calculated that seven out of ten people were incapable of self-government. Unfortunately, such a proposition becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. People treated as helpless infants start to BEHAVE like helpless infants (witness the current state of New Zealand) - then they cry out in panic at the thought of Nanny State leaving them to their own devices. It's a mistake to superimpose this context over a free future. The advent of a free society would presuppose that people had started to think for themselves, that a widespread attitudinal sea-change had occurred. At the moment, that's as unimaginable as it is desirable - so why don't we work toward THAT point before we start to second-guess what would happen to invalid orphans?
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