Let’s say you want to convince all the US citizens about an idea. Not a very good idea, to be honest, but you still want to convince them about it. Despite its weak nature, you’ve got a sound budget to pull it through: around 33% - a third - of everything they produce. As miserable as your idea can be, if you had all that money, it wouldn’t be that hard, right?
Well, that fat slice is roughly what the state takes from us by the various fees and taxing laws year after year. Such an impressive amount of money is spent on persuading the American people to love and praise the state. Is it a surprise that so many Americans are fierce supporters of the government? Of course not - things can’t be so coincidental.
Libertarians, however, are waging war on that. They are trying to convince people that taxes are legal plunders and that the state is a bunch of criminals ruining our lives.
According to the Government Publishing Office, the estimated budget for fiscal year 2017 is 3,644 billion dollars (though some other sources point to something around 6 trillion dollars or beyond). Honestly, it is kind of hard to compete with an organization that high on cash.
This government budget had me and my family for 28 years. Even though I had great education and held a hardworking life, it kept filling my spirit with demotivation and kept me far away from people who saw the world like me. But then, an unexpected visitor came to my life. “I’m not here to harm you”, he said - “I’m here to help you”. He told me about this world where freedom is real. Where men had had enough of the taxers, the takers, the fakers, the users and losers that exploited our work, our talents, our ideas for their own ends.
You reached us here, so it means you have already met a part of the work of these men of the mind, creators of business, of worlds, of ideas, jobs, passions and progress, money and freedom. And I hope it also means that you are wondering how to help them succeed.
There are lots of guys I know who say they’d like to do their part, write articles, create content, but “Ah, I just can’t write well” or “I ain’t got time to really organize my ideas”, and all sort of excuses. You can still donate money to someone who is actually doing it. There are so many sites, so many study groups, people writing articles and making educational content, YouTube channels, Steemit pages, good programmers and cryptocoin projects, and you can help them. You can do your part by tipping them what, 5 dollars? That helps. That helps a lot.
We are on war against an organization holding a trillionaire budget and we are growing, attracting the attention of regulators, government reps, fake news makers, haters. After a long day of work we sometimes wonder: Is it really worth it? But then, we look at our community, our work, our charity, freedom.. and the answer is: yes.
We're fighting the state on the ideological field. We still have to pay the taxes and finance our enemy. And everyone is doing it. So if you want to break it, put 5, 10 bucks a month on it. Support a writer, buy cryptocoins. Compared to what the state takes from you every month that’s nothing, but it's a huge difference to our cause.
One of the reasons behind the success and maintenance of most libertarian channels is that the people behind them work on them full time. They are serious, full-time jobs. And there are lots of new projects that these people would like to dive into and lots of different ways they wish to do it for the community, but they can't. They're out of money and they've got no time. It’s hard. It’s hard to do it without financing, and it’s damn hard to do it over a common job, family obligations, study time and everything else that you’ve got to do.
If you're on our side, if you want to help freedom thrive, just support someone. By doing nothing, you will still be supporting the state. You will still be paying your taxes. And the state is still going to use your money to finance the cortical warfare on freedom and to convince dozens of thousands of people that all moral, justice and freedom come forth only from their laws. Quoting a stretch from Frédéric Bastiat’s famous work “The Law”, written in 1850 but still true to this day:
“No wonder the politicians of the nineteenth century look upon society as an artificial production of the legislator’s genius. This idea, the result of a classical education, has taken possession of all the thinkers and great writers of our country. To all these persons, the relations between mankind and the legislator appear to be the same as those that exist between the clay and the potter.”
Let us reach your folks and show them that values and virtue are not born from laws written by bureaucrats, but from the hard work of the honest people they plunder. Honestly, it’s not too hard. Had we 1% of that budget, it would be over..
Just don’t do nothing. As Hank Rearden, from Ayn Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged, reminds us:
“It’s we who move the world and it’s we who will pull it through.”