"The same government that trained me to kill trained you to protect. Yet now you want to kill me while up on that roof I protected you."
--Mitch Leary (In the Line of Fire)
One of the oldest crimes is the protection racket. B solicits payments from A. In exchange, B agrees to 'protect' A from harm done by...B.
I am reminded of the circularity of the protection scheme when I hear statists argue in favor of taxes. The now infamous "You didn't build that alone" claim suggests that public works assembled from tax dollars helped you build it. But those resources were obtained by aggression or threat of aggression.
The argument boils down to, "Our capacity for aggression benefits you, so pay up."
The State has learned the protection racket well.
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When people say 'let's do something about it,' they mean 'let's get hold of the political machinery so that we can do something to somebody else.' And that somebody is invariably you.
~Frank Chodorov
I don't trust society to protect us, I have no intention of placing my fate in the hands of men whose only qualification is that they managed to con a block of people to vote for them.
~Mario Puzo, The Godfather, 1972
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