Modern Barbary Pirates - How Government Dragoons The People

'Government is not the solution', said Ronald Reagan, 'it is the problem', thus ushering in an era of privatization and reducing the size and influence of government.  Of course neither he nor any other president was able to do so, and the bureaucracy - despite the considered efforts of Donald Trump and Elon Musk - is still the behemoth it always has been. 

 

The Founding Fathers never envisaged the new republic so.  Government was to be facilitator, caretaker, and defender.  It was the enterprise, ambition, and hard work of the individual which would enable his family, his community, and his country to prosper. 

'Rugged individualism' was the meme and ethos of the day.  It was through this determination, this sense of individual enterprise that Westward expansion was enabled, and the dream of Manifest Destiny, an America from coast to coast, was realized. 

It was private enterprise that built railroads, ports, and roads, that built towns and their granaries, banks, saloons, and stores.  Government was there to facilitate this enterprise, to survey and plat the land.  Land ownership was capital on which money could be borrowed, and fair and just settlement of disputes over property rights was the responsibility of the courts. 

Government was small, supportive, and useful; but over time this narrowly conceived role expanded to its present size, and government today is present, like never before, in the affairs of its private citizens.  It is a multi-trillion dollar business, taking money from individuals and with arrogated authority, spending it willy-nilly in their interest and legislating to itself vast, uninhibited powers and the freedom to upsent ordinary lives. 

The Constitution envisioned only one role for government - the defense of the homeland - but allowed a certain measure of jurisprudence.  The framers of the Constitution agreed on the principle of private enterprise to be aided, facilitated, and encouraged by a minimalist government. 

According to the Left, the Democrat Party and especially its progressive wing had been responsible for legislative actions on climate change, gender equality, redistribution of wealth, and a policy of 'pursuant peace', and legislators in Congress had long been advocates for a strong, interventionist public sector. 

How could radical social reform be effected without the presence of federal authority and the allocation of funds from the treasury?  It was the arrogance, manipulation, and total dereliction of moral responsibility of the private sector which held back the country's utopian promise; and only if this maleficent sector could be flayed, neutered, and disassembled, could the nation truly and equitably prosper. 

Social activists had no qualms about the size of the federal budget and the increased taxes that made necessary spending possible.  It was the duty of every man and woman to contribute his or her fair share to the reformist, universalist, and profoundly moral purposes of government; and the role of government to help the poor, the disadvantaged, and the marginalized with such honestly generated revenues. 

Now, not everyone was happy with this turn of the screw, the complete abandonment of the originalist principles of Hamilton and Franklin, and growing, seemingly unstoppable power and influence of government.  There were those like Harlan Putnam, descendant of the colonial Putnams members of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, in the evangelizing mission of John Davenport, and later scions of shipbuilding and the transatlantic trade. 

Putnams had made inestimable wealth from these enterprises, and went on to found more than one Wall Street investment bank. The Putnams were confidants, supporters, and advisers to the great industrialists of the early Twentieth Century - Rockefeller, Carnegie, Vanderbilt, and J.P. Morgan.  The not only provided valuable financial and economic counsel, but were the heart and soul of private enterprise.  Harlan's ancestor, Isaiah Putnam had warned Rockefeller and his associates of 'the restive lion in his lair', the sleeping giant of government, and now Harlan saw how right his forbear was. 

'Dragooned', he said speaking of the American taxpayer who was at the mercy of predatory, manipulative, seditious legislators and their progressive shills, and who gave up thousands to the beast in Washington with little say. 

Yes, of course they had some say in principle - their votes counted - but the entire system was rigged against them.  Government was the only American institution without accountability.  Billions could be poured down the sluice of the Treasury with nary a nod to performance.  Progressive governance was one based on utopian optimism and neo-socialist promise. No private enterprise would ever get away with such financial irresponsibility. 

The private sector elite of the country - the new Rockefellers and Carnegies, Bezos, Huang, Musk, Brin, and Zuckerberg - do their best to keep the beast at bay, but viral progressivism still epidemic despite the decommission of Joe Biden and the election of Donald Trump, maintains its pressure.  The private sector, made up of greedy, oppressive, arrogant capitalists cannot be trusted, progressives insist.  Their inventions, discoveries, and innovations only benefit the rich, and if they are allowed to exist their predatory, acquisitive nature must be held in check.

It is not just the Harlan Putnams who are exercised over the unwanted jamboree of public spending, but the American working class who unwillingly fuel with their hard-earned money the follies of big government.  Seeing paychecks winnowed away by government taxation with nothing to show for it, these Americans are as exercised as the wealthy Putnams.  They are taxed at tax time, every time they buy a burger or shop at Walmart, every time they fill up the tank, for every move they make; and the rates keep rising. 

'For the public good', insist progressives who have bigger things in mind than the unpatriotic worries of those who, despite their favored status as members of the marginalized, protected class, are dismissed as irrelevant to national priorities.  These people cannot see the big picture, so focused are they on insignificant concerns. 

'Barbary Pirates', said Harlan to a group of investors considering an infusion of cash in a promising new private enterprise but hesitating while Congress debated new, punitive legislation designed to limit such private investment in favor of increased, 'morally dispensed' public expenditure. 

The Barbary pirates were privateers who operated from the North African 'Barbary (Berber) Coast', modern day Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya, from the 16th fo the 19th centuries. They captured European and American merchant vessels in the Mediterranean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean to steal cargo. They enslaved an estimated 800,000 to 1.25 million Europeans over three centuries or held them for expensive ransoms. They raided coastal towns and villages across Europe—not just in the Mediterranean, but as far north as Great Britain, Ireland, and Iceland.

'The Somalis are petty thieves compared to them', said Harlan, quite impressed.  'Imagine! over three centuries of uninhibited piracy'; and that was exactly the point, he went on, citing the American history of tax piracy. 

Hayreddin Barbarossa was the most famous of all Barbary corsairs. He and his brother captured Algiers for the Ottoman Empire, and Hayreddin later became the Grand Admiral of the Ottoman fleet after major naval victories.  'There was no one like him before or since...unless you look on our shores'. 

Harlan's colleagues laughed at the simile - Harlan knew his history - but to him it was no laughing matter.  Federal taxation was piracy, no bones about it. 'Taking money from someone who earned it and giving it to someone who didn't'.  A corruption of moral justice. 

There were those who lived off the grid, deep in the woods of Humboldt County or the Idaho panhandle.  No Social Security card, no drivers' license, existing without a trace, living off the land and their wits, originalist Americans, but too fringy, deliberately disenfranchised, and wayward to make a difference, but at least they stood on principle. 

Harlan's hero was White Wolf, a Comanche chief who raped, disemboweled, hanged from trees, and burned men, women, and children in defiance of white intruders to Comanche land and a bloody lesson to them.  He was a true American - proud, native, defiant, and indomitable, a symbol of honor, strength, and courage. 

'I'm sure he paid no taxes', Harlan said to his colleagues, and so ended a toast to him.