Yes, Statism is a Problem… But So Are Conspiracy Theories

Podcast: Play in new window | Download | Embed

Subscribe: Email | RSS

Mandeville, LA – Exclusive Audio & Transcript – We are all fully aware that the growing central government is a major problem in this day and age… well, the listeners of this show and readers of this site at least.  But to think that there are people who are gathering in secret and actively planning, and have been for the last 50 years, the demise of America is absolutely absurd. It makes a great movie plot but in real life it just doesn’t happen. Please remove your tinfoil hat, do what you can to fight statism, and stop worrying about all of the conspiracies.

Begin Mike Church Show Transcript

Mike:  Betty is in North Carolina.  Hello, Betty.

Caller Betty:  Hey.  How you doing?

Mike:  I am well, madam, thank you.

Caller Betty:  Well, good.  I just got a comment, talking about women and stay-at-home moms.  I have been a stay-at-home, homeschooling mom.  I think the most anti-statist thing a mom can do is stay home and raise her children and homeschool them and teach them to become anti-statists so that we can get another generation going of people who are thinkers, who are able to be self-reliant, compassionate, and wonderful things like that.  That’s my comment to you.

Mike:  Wow.  Good grief.  I think you’ve said it all.  I think that that is a very accurate way to describe it.  It is one of the most anti-statist things that you can do.  Can I give you an anti-statist thing that men can do?

Caller Betty:  Absolutely.

Mike:  One of the most anti-statist things that men can do is to self-employ.  Those of you that are self-employed are more conservative and far more anti-statist than you may realize.  You have rejected the paternalistic emphasis that has come from the state, our father the state, which has told you your entire life that what you do is go to our schools, go to our colleges, get our degrees in our chosen field, and then you go off to work in one of our industries that we have made popular by jerry-rigging or rigging tax code.

Then you work for one of these companies and you contribute to our approved pensions programs, our approved healthcare programs, our approved parking programs, and the list goes on and on.  You do this for your entire life.  Don’t forget you also participate in our social security system.  At the end of it, when you get to the age that we say you can retire, then you may consider retiring because we have blessed it.  An American male’s entire life is one spent dancing with the state, until you go Galt, until you go rogue, until you self-employ.  You cannot be a John Galt or an anti-statist and work for the man, can you, Betty?

Caller Betty:  You’re right.  I think being responsible for our own families and our own outcomes is the way that we’ve got to start thinking.  If we start consigning our children — well, we’ve been, for decades and generations, consigning ourselves and our children to the government systems, including the government school system, and you end up in this prison system.  You’re segregated with this group of people that you don’t necessarily have anything in common with, except for geographical proximity and relative age, subjected by law in compulsion to a forced system of education that really has done nothing but disservice to the entire population.  Of course, we can put on our tin hats here and say that it’s a conspiracy theory, and I think it is.

Mike:  You have to really stop and think about that for a moment.  Do you really think, at the dawn of the Progressive Era, that there was a coven of men and women that met together each in a robe with a hood on it with some sort of pagan symbol emblazoned on its chest?  They met in some big, giant stone chamber, each holding a candle with two hands at about chest height and they all marched into this stone cavern and around some stone tableau or some stone table.  There was a young, naked virgin laying there.

They all did their Latin incantations and went over the list of things they were going to accomplish and how they were going to remake society in their own image.  Then they each took a vow that they would do so through the virgin’s blood.  Then they cut the virgin and each had to partake in.  Look, 100 years later, all of it’s been accomplished.  In a movie, I can see it happening.  In real life, not so sure.

Caller Betty:  I wouldn’t go so far as to pain the picture you do.  In the 19th Century, the beginning of the Progressive movement, what came out of the utopian thinkers and utopian communities of Europe, along with the nationalist and romantic period of culture.  Then it found place in the United States with some people with Dewey and some of these others that really wanted to help people.  They thought they wanted to help people and this is the way they were going to do it.  I think they ended up really being manipulated by people who were influenced by the Prussian education system, which really was to develop a compliant workforce and a compliant society where they would do what the government told them to do.  I think that is exactly our legacy in education today.

Mike:  I don’t disagree.  We are creatures of the state.  We are ordered about by the state.  We order our lives in the manner in which the state tells us to.  This Sunday, 110 million Americans are going to make a trip to the post office to make sure they get an envelope into a mailbox before midnight, because they wouldn’t want to defy their federal masters at the IRS, would they?  This Sunday is a ritual that has been engrained into the minds and seared into the brains of every living soul in the land.  You don’t defy the IRS.  You do so at your and Wesley Snipes’ peril.  This is just another part of the dance with the state.

Can man exist without the state is the political question.  There is a cultural and a moral question that you can ask similarly.  Can civilization exist without the state?  What is government?  Can government exist without the civilization?  That’s if you reverse the roles.  This is why the essay that I read part of the other day from my friend Brad Birzer about St. Augustine was so powerful.  It touched so many of you that you requested that I post it again.  I received emails from people that said I read that essay about St. Augustine and the tradition and about how Augustine identified the kingdom, as he called it, as thieves.  Augustine, even way back in the First Century, saw what happened when government organized.  He didn’t say we shouldn’t have a government.  What he said was it was never to be trusted.  You never turn away.  You must always be looking at it and monitoring it and be very, very frugal with the powers you endow it with.  So we are all creatures of the state.

End Mike Church Show Transcript