Obama Claims That Government Tyranny is Impossible, Because “Government is Us”

By JG Vibes

The thing that makes Obama so frightening to people who care about freedom isn’t necessarily the things he writes down on paper. Lets face it, every politician to ever hold office, regardless of their intentions or their party affiliation, has done nothing but kick the can of tyranny down the road for the next guy to further exploit.

However, the thing that is extra creepy about Obama is that he is an extremely skilled propagandist. He is constantly putting forward collectivist rhetoric, which is obviously crafted to deceive and diminish the rights and importance of the individual in society. In nearly every speech you can hear the sophistry, and sometimes he even comes out and lays down his propaganda in plain English, as he did recently in Colorado.

Breitbart reported that:

“In his big pitch in Colorado on Wednesday for further gun control, President Obama made an astonishing statement about gun rights advocates’ fears of governmental gun seizures. He said that such worries would just feed “into fears about government. You hear some of these folks: ‘I need a gun to protect myself from the government. We can’t do background checks because the government’s going to come take my guns away.’ The government’s us. These officials are elected by you … I am constrained as they are constrained by the system that our founders put in place.”

By saying that himself and the rest of the government are constrained, he is saying that the government has no ability to force their will on the general population. It should be obvious to anyone by now that this is not the case and that what we were told in history class is not right, government tyranny has been with us since the founding of the country, and is with us moreso today.

What Obama is saying here is that government tyranny is impossible because the government is “us”. Well, the last time that I checked, I wasn’t allowed to tax my neighbors, or interrupt their ride to work, search their car and kidnap them because I found something that I didn’t like. The last time i checked there are various ruling classes on this planet that are separated from their subjects by organizations known as governments, like the one that Obama is currently representing.

As Murray Rothbard explained decades ago in “Anatomy of the State:

With the rise of democracy, the identification of the State with society has been redoubled, until it is common to hear sentiments expressed which violate virtually every tenet of reason and common sense such as, “we are the government.” The useful collective term “we” has enabled an ideological camouflage to be thrown over the reality of political life. If “we are the government,” then anything a government does to an individual is not only just and untyrannical but also “voluntary” on the part of the individual concerned. If the government has incurred a huge public debt which must be paid by taxing one group for the benefit of another, this reality of burden is obscured by saying that “we owe it to ourselves”; if the government conscripts a man, or throws him into jail for dissident opinion, then he is “doing it to himself” and, therefore, nothing untoward has occurred. Under this reasoning, any Jews murdered by the Nazi government were not murdered; instead, they must have “committed suicide,” since they were the government (which was democratically chosen), and, therefore, anything the government did to them was voluntary on their part. One would not think it necessary to belabor this point, and yet the overwhelming bulk of the people hold this fallacy to a greater or lesser degree.

We must, therefore, emphasize that “we” are not the government; the government is not “us.” The government does not in any accurate sense “represent” the majority of the people.[1] But, even if it did, even if 70 percent of the people decided to murder the remaining 30 percent, this would still be murder and would not be voluntary suicide on the part of the slaughtered minority.[2] No organicist metaphor, no irrelevant bromide that “we are all part of one another,” must be permitted to obscure this basic fact.

If, then, the State is not “us,” if it is not “the human family” getting together to decide mutual problems, if it is not a lodge meeting or country club, what is it? Briefly, the State is that organization in society which attempts to maintain a monopoly of the use of force and violence in a given territorial area; in particular, it is the only organization in society that obtains its revenue not by voluntary contribution or payment for services rendered but by coercion. While other individuals or institutions obtain their income by production of goods and services and by the peaceful and voluntary sale of these goods and services to others, the State obtains its revenue by the use of compulsion; that is, by the use and the threat of the jailhouse and the bayonet.

[3] Having used force and violence to obtain its revenue, the State generally goes on to regulate and dictate the other actions of its individual subjects. One would think that simple observation of all States through history and over the globe would be proof enough of this assertion; but the miasma of myth has lain so long over State activity that elaboration is necessary.

What Obama attempted to do in his most recent speech, and what he attempts to do often, is to blur the lines between the ruling class and the general population by using the scam of collectivism.

This idea of collectivism is the mindset that allows tyrants to wage war. If each individual on this earth was held accountable for their own personal actions then the full-scale war that we see today would never even materialize to begin with. If individuals were actually seen as who they were instead of what group they belonged to, there would not be millions of lives sacrificed for the sake of hunting down a few among them who were accused of some real or fabricated transgression.

Likewise, it is this mentality that is the root of all the bigotry that separates humanity. If all of the people on the earth were seen as individuals then racism, sexism, classism and other forms of discrimination would cease to exist and everyone would be responsible for their own actions.

The rhetoric behind collectivism sounds great at face value, but the real-life consequences of this worldview tell a very different story. It may be natural for humans to form social groups, but we must recognize that those groups are all filled with unique individuals who should not be forced to compromise any of their freedom for the sake of a group or authority figure.

Respecting the rights and needs of individuals is actually a much more caring way of looking at things, than grouping people into categories and expecting them to forfeit their personal sovereignty to satisfy the whims of other human beings.

When I speak of collectivist societies I am not only speaking of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, who are among the most obvious collectivized regimes in recent history. I am actually pointing out that collectivism is a trait that all modern governments share, since all governments ask the people living under their control to sacrifice their individual rights for the sake of “the country”.

This is where we can start to see the problem, because “the country” is never the millions of people living in that geographic area that consider themselves to be “the country”. They are not the people who make the decisions that “the country” is judged by, nor are they the people who reap the benefits of “the country’s” policies.

Even worse, is the fact that when a few people who claim to “represent” or “lead” a collective group of individuals commit some sort of heinous human rights violation, it is not just those few people who will ultimately be held accountable, it is the whole collective that they are apparently acting on behalf of.

Protecting the rights of the individual from the whims of the “group” (or people claiming leadership of that group), is one of the important steps that we must take to ensure that every individual has the same rights and that those rights will not be violated under any circumstances.

Also I want to be clear that I’m not suggesting that people should shut themselves off from society; that has nothing to do with any of this. It is a great thing for people to form communities, trade and find mutually beneficial ways of interacting. What is not a great thing, is forcing individuals to conform to a collective group or to sacrifice the individual’s rights for any reason.

http://intellihub.com/2013/04/05/oba...ernment-is-us/