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What Is Government? (Political Cow: Episode 1)

From the College of Subversive Knowledge (SUBSCRIBE):



Using two cows as a metaphor for illustrating how various political systems function is a practice that’s been around since at least the 1930’s.

Here are a few of the better examples:

SOCIALISM: You have two cows. The government takes one and gives it to your neighbor.

COMMUNISM: You have two cows. You give them to the government, and the government then gives you some milk.

FASCISM: You have two cows. You give them to the government, and the government then sells you some milk.

CAPITALISM: You have two cows. You sell one and buy a bull.

NAZISM: You have two cows. The government takes both and shoots you.

And that, in essence, is what Political Cow is all about:







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Happy Birthday, Isabel Paterson

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Have you heard of Isabel Paterson?

She was born January 22, 1886, Manitoulin Island, Canada, and she is unquestionably the most underrated of all American political philosophers.

An autodidact and an extraordinarily formidable intellect, Isabel Paterson wrote many essays and books, but her best and most famous work is  The God of the Machine, in which she wrote, among other things:

Government is solely an instrument or mechanism of appropriation, prohibition, compulsion, and extinction; in the nature of things it can be nothing else, and can operate to no other end…. Seen in this light, government is so horrific – and its actual operations in the past have been so horrible at times – that there is some excuse for a failure to realize its necessity (Isabel Paterson, The God of the Machine, 1943).

 

From Brittney Little’s excellent article:

 

Isabel Paterson is undoubtedly not as widely known as she deserves to be. Of course, we all know Ayn Rand but did you know that Rand admitted she owed an intellectual debt to Paterson? Well, you see, someone had to teach Rand about the wonders of the free market, and that teacher was Isabel Paterson. Paterson led a young group of writers in the late 1930s, and she would stay up all night long answering all of Rand’s and Rose Wilder Lane’s questions.

Paterson, Rand, and Lane, are considered to be the three founding mothers of libertarianism in America. So besides tutor those two ladies all night, what exactly did Paterson do? Paterson is noted for being a journalist, novelist, political philosopher, and a literary critic. According to her biographer, Stephen Cox, Paterson is the “earliest progenitor of libertarianism as we know it today.” She wrote about free trade and opposed the major economic program of her time, known as the New Deal. Paterson was in favor of less government involvement in both economic and social issues.

Something even more amazing about Paterson is how she came to be the woman she was. Her only formal education consisted of two years in a log schoolhouse on Manitoulin Island in Canada. She moved to the United States when she was young and became a US citizen in Michigan in the year 1928. Even though she was only schooled for two years, she took her education into her own hands. She spent many nights reading classical poetry and literature, which seemingly treated her well. Many credit the lack of government schooling for Paterson’s courageous and unregulated thinking.

We can also look to her past to help understand her economic beliefs. She was raised in a very poor family and had to work at a very young age to help chip in. Her family often lived in tents, and Paterson spent most of her days as a waitress, stenographer, and even a bookkeeper.

(Link)

 

 

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Say What?

Government is not reason, it is not eloquence — it is force.

Said George Washington.

The state is the coldest of all cold monsters that bites with stolen teeth.

Said Nietzsche.

Government is solely an instrument or mechanism of appropriation, prohibition, compulsion, and extinction; in the nature of things it can be nothing else, and can operate to no other end…. Seen in this light, government is so horrific — and its actual operations in the past have been so horrible at times — that there is some excuse for a failure to realize its necessity.

Said Isabel Paterson.

Take care, you who call yourself my judge. Take care what you do. For the truth is that I have my mission from God, and you put yourself in great danger.

Said Joan of Arc (aged 17) to her chief Inquisitor.

They rowed her in across the rolling foam —
The cruel, crawling foam — to her grave beside the sea.

Wrote the English author Charles Kingsley (1819 – 1875) — in response to which the pedantic John Ruskin said:

The foam is not cruel, neither does it crawl.

Unquote.

We talk about our assholes, and we talk about our cocks, and we talk about who we fucked last night, or who we’re going to fuck tomorrow, or when we got drunk, or when we stuck a broom in our ass in the Hotel Ambassador in Prague — anybody tell one’s friends about that.

Said “poet” Allen Ginsberg, in an anthologized interview.

A writer of something occasionally like English — and a man of something occasionally like genius.

Said Swinburne of Walt Whitman.

A man standing up to his neck in a cesspool — and adding to its contents.

Said Thomas Carlyle of Swinburne.

Quoting Noam Chomsky, in Language and Politics (p. 293):

I’ve never considered myself a ‘Marxist,’ and in fact regard such notions as ‘Marxist’ as belonging more to the domain of organized religion than of rational analysis.

Then, quoting Noam Chomsky on p. 113 of the exact same book:

In my opinion, a Marxist-anarchist perspective [on politics] is justified quite apart from anything that may happen in linguistics.

And on p. 153 of this self-same book:

I wouldn’t abandon Marxism.

Unquote.

In his ideological fanaticism [Noam Chomsky] constantly shifts his arguments and bends references, quotations and facts, while declaring his ‘commitment to find the truth.’

Said Leopold Labedz.

Everything vital in the world comes from neurotics. They alone have founded religions and composed our masterpieces.

Said Proust.

God, if there is one, please save my soul, if I have one.

Prayed Voltaire.

Human life is an unceasing sequence of single actions.

Said Ludwig von Mises.