United Liberty

Douglas Gibbs played a little thought experiment with my clouded, pre-caffeinated mind this morning that was so effective, I felt the need to share it. If you harbor a violent distaste for mice, this experiment might be a little risque for you:

When you have mice in the attic, but only a couple, usually it is not a big concern. You set out a trap or two, and hope you catch one. If you never hear them, and they never make an appearance, you pretend they aren’t there. You ignore their existence.

Imagine if the mice could convince you that they weren’t mice at all. How could anything so cute be bad, right? Before you know it, they are sitting around the table having dinner with you, and as long as you don’t call them mice, they are fine with it. They are part of the family.

You wake up in the morning to go to work, and a mouse winks at you and waves goodbye. When you get home have of the living room is covered with shreds of paper. Droppings litter the hall. But they tell you not to worry, the house still belongs to you. They are only making a few changes, but the basic foundation of the home still belongs to you.

By the end of the week you are eating on the floor as they all sit around the dinner table. After all, it was wrong of you to have such a good life while the poor mice had to live in the attic with traps all around. Eating on the floor is your way to apologize and be fair.

Then you realize you were wrong all along. They aren’t mice, no matter how much they convinced you that they were. You’ve been thinking they are mice, they act like mice, but they didn’t want you calling them mice. But it doesn’t matter. Because in the end it turns out that they are rats.

Totalitarian dictatorships rise innocently. They take advantage of break-downs in self-government. They move in when no other means seems capable of preserving national unity. They claim they are concerned with maintaining the status quo, and will do whatever it takes to disallow sectors to fail in society.

As such seemingly harmless mice take over the government, using cute little words with what seems like good intentions, they claim to be in the corner of the worker while simultaneously destroying the freedom of the working class environment through the destruction of the private sector. Under the guise of creating alliances with powerful capitalistic corporations, they gain control over them, using excessive governmental regulations, and any means they can use to dictate to the companies changes in wages and personnel. Eventually, they condemn all deviation from the party line and control all facets of the various industries.

You can learn more about Gibbs’ sound and sensible conclusions here.