Hoyt: Ungovernable

So Sarah Hoyt (also started reading DarkShip Renegades today, so good so far), takes an idea similar to Whittle's  in her essay about the US being Ungovernable.

When people’s lives are made impossible, they find ways to live.  This was true, even in Portugal in the seventies, with a  flourishing black market and most regulations ignored.  How much more true will it be here, at the first signs of true pinching? 

Or take Greece or Italy where cheating on your taxes is considered a national pass-time and every business does a bit of shady work and black and grey markets are just a part of life.

Just look at the attempts to force an online sales tax on the US citizens will go. The more they post, the more illegitimate and most of all the more incompetent their laws are the more people will shrug and ignore them.   Know anyone that's pirated a movie or a book or a game? Even if it's a game they already own?

And Hoyt also takes a similar stance as Whittle to remind people that the government is not the country.  A distinction Statists are naturally opposed to.

So…  after sixty years of creeping statism, they’ve now “captured the flag” – they have actually got all of the important systems sewn up: news, entertainment, education, government.
They think – can you blame them? – that they won. 

I won’t say they can’t hurt us.  They can.  The mechanisms they’ve seized hold of are important and they are – natch – misusing them. 

I’m not saying that this will be easy.  It won’t.  Our economy is likely to be an incredible shambles, and I’ve said before I think we’ll lose at least one city. 

But, listen, the problem with these sons of… Babel is that they might be American, but they’re not American ENOUGH.  If they were, they’d understand “ungovernable” and this willingness for each of us to go it alone (often for common benefit, but on own recognizance, nonetheless) is not a bug.  It’s a feature.  And that it’s baked in the cake of a people who came here to escape the top-down spirit of other places.  Some of the black sheep (or as one friend of mine calls it, the plaid sheep) attitude is genetic, hereditary, inborn.  And enough of us have it. 

Push harder and we escape harder, through crevices they don’t even know are there.  Forbid us from making a living, and we’ll find a way to go around you.  Make it impossible to defend ourselves, and I shudder to think what some of my friends and neighbors will come up with.  Make the economy impossible, and we’ll create another one you can’t reach.  Make regulations too binding and we’ll either ignore them or – more likely – creatively subvert them.
They captured the flag, and they think they captured the nation.  It’s the type of mistake that the bureaucratic mind makes.

And as she points out earlier,  there's no where else for us to go.  So why not?  It's not like there's a choice.  And our "social betters" will always exempt themselves anyway.

Though they'll get off easier when they flout the laws they put on the rest of us, because they've got good intentions.

Like how Mr. A will rant about the need for strict Federal food safety controls, but is all about going to a Farmer's market and buying "natural" beef.  Not to mention his enjoyment of pot.    Remember, you can trust the police to pick and choose who can carry a gun, but not who should go to prison or who gets to use drugs!