"I once worked for a corporation. I quit. I wondered whether I
could do the same thing to the government. It was like trying to
balance a greased watermelon on one finger." (The Underground, Jon Rappoport)
There are various ways to calculate how government owns people. The simplest is: through money.
Aside from taxes, this would translate into government jobs and welfare.
People
who receive some or all of their income through their rulers tend to be
on the side of government. They're certainly dependent on government.
Look at Australia, a nation with a population of 23.1 million people.
As
The Guardian
reports (8/13), out of a total of 11.5 Australian million jobs, 1.9
million (16.4%, 1 out of 6) are for government. And this does not
include the Defence Department (58,000 jobs).
As reported by Peter Whiteford, in
"FactCheck: Is half to two-thirds of the Australian population receiving a government benefit?", at theconversation-dot-com, about 50% of all Australian households receive some form of government $$ assistance.
I
haven't found figures for how many Australian companies are government
contractors, but you can be sure the number and the money are large.
All those employees are receiving government money.
Then there
are numerous "state-owned enterprises," which are companies wholly owned
by government. Their employees are ultimately getting their paychecks
via government $$.
Seeing the picture?
You can analyze other industrialized nations and find similar conditions.
But
of course, no one who favors "the collective good" sees all this as a
problem. The problem for them, as always, is not enough "government
support."
Because for them, government is the answer and the ultimate benefactor and the primary force inventing the future. All hail.
Half
a century ago, intellectuals who had a clue about what was going on
called government The State. They viewed it as a monolithic force bent
on expanding its power and subjugating the individual. Now, many of
those same people, or their descendants, view government as the escape
hatch from injustice.
This delusion is bolstered by the multiplication of victim groups seeking special treatment from their political leaders.
We would be wise to consider Albert Camus' statement in his 1951 essay,
The Rebel:
"The slave begins by demanding justice and ends by wanting to wear a crown. He must dominate in his turn."Starting
in the 1960s, several generations of people began applying New Age
"rainbow thoughts" to politics. By the 1990s, this practice spread to
the point where its advocates actually believed The State could and
would deliver a far better world.
In a detailed November 2013 article (independentaustralia-dot-net),
"The surveillance state: How Australia spies on its own," Murray Hunter writes,
"The
revelations released by Edward Snowden... are only the tip of the
iceberg when it comes to Australian security surveillance
operations...Through rapid technology advances, the Australian security
apparatus has grown to an Orwellian scale."Author Hunter then describes the system:
"The
Australian Government database is a highly sophisticated group of
electronic document and records management system(s) (EDRMS) for
collating, storing, and matching data between various agencies and
levels of government on citizens. Consequently data collected by the
Australian Taxation Office (ATO), social security (Centrelink),
Medicare, immigration, customs, and police enforcement agencies are
integrated with relational databases and query systems. This is
supplemented by individual agency databases with extremely detailed
information on citizens. They carry an almost complete personal history
of residential details going back decades, income, occupation, spouses,
children, social security benefits, medical, and travel information,
etc. These systems can be accessed by almost anybody within the public
service. Every agency within the government has become part of the
intelligence collection network."This gargantuan apparatus is the work of a government that "really cares" about the population?
"You
people work for us. You take home a paycheck from us (derived from
your taxes). You depend on us. But that's not enough. We need to spy
on you all day every day."
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