Take a beat to think about what the government does for you.
To be fair a LOT of this stuff is taken for granted.
Things like:
- Hospitals and healthcare
- Roads
- Power and water (although power is largely privatized)
- Social programs
- FDA inspectors
- Police
- Firemen
Federal, state, and local governments are responsible for a lot of infrastructure. As much as I'd like to talk trash and ask, "When's the last time the gov did anything for you?" It's simply a loaded question meant undermine and ignore all the thankless things they do for the people... unless of course you're from Nigeria or whatever and the government is even somehow more corrupt than USA. I can't speak to other countries other than my own, and even then I'm on shaky ground.
If I had to guess, I was personally on food-stamps for something like 10 years. That's $200 a month for 120 months... basically got $24000 for "free" off the taxpayer's dime. Of course I had to be dirt poor that entire time to qualify for the full amount; well under the national poverty limit. Obviously this is not the ideal situation.
Lot's of people will complain when they see a "mooch" siphoning off tax dollars like that. Of course these people are not to be taken seriously because they never mention things like the police state and infinite warfare and meddling, which are much more expensive than food-stamps (and other social programs), excuse me I mean Calfresh/EBT. Never forget to rebrand the name of the thing when public sentiment turns sour.
Does the government thinks it owns you?
They certainly seem to act like it. In fact a lot of my friends from high-school joined the military and the language used in that case seems to be that the government explicitly owns you on paper. They don't seem to be too subtle about it.
Take taxes for example.
If I win the lottery, the government thinks they are entitled to a big chunk of the winnings. Why is that? What if I had paid a million dollars on lottery tickets before I had finally won? If I paid a million dollars to win a million dollars I just lost money because of taxes. The only way to get around this is if the $1M loss was all in the same calendar year and I was able to offset the winnings with my loss... a highly unlikely scenario for lottery winners on the average, especially when taken in aggregate across multiple people. Lotteries are designed to be a scam like that. You lose on average playing them and then the government scoops even more. The math is ludicrous across every metric.
Meanwhile, the government excepts zero risk.
If I take a risk and win the lottery, the government wants my money. Will the government accept the risk of the lottery? Of course not! They want to take zero risk and just take yours no matter what you had to do to get there. Same goes if I boot up an extremely risky startup. To hell with all those failed startups... but government be damned if they're gonna let the successful ones not fork over their winnings. See how this works? Zero risk, all reward.
The government thinks they are so entitled to our money and labor that if we refuse to pay they'll hit us with an even bigger fine. If we don't pay that they send men with guns to take us to jail (which is ironic because the money used to imprison you is siphoned from other taxpayers). If we resist the men with guns they will shoot us, all the while the aggressors will sit on their high horses and act as though they are 100% in the right and infallibly morally superior. Yeah, they aren't though.
This is what we like to call an abusive relationship.
And a really bad one at that; full of gaslighting, superiority complexes, control, and violence. And yet everyone simply accepts it because it's the way it's "always" been.
Except it's not how it's always been.
People like to say things like, "Who will build the roads?" in response to libertarian rhetoric. It's such a bad question; history is my least favorite subject of all time and even I know that it wasn't that long ago that income tax didn't even exist. And then when it came into being it was only like 3% or something, and people were still furious about it. The frog boils slowly.
Taxes no longer make sense except in the context of slavery
Certainly this isn't 100% true today but it is the direction we've been heading in for a long time. Every year the governments around the world get more corrupt. Every year they spend money on things we never agreed to spend money on. Every year is more waste of resources and inefficiency.
And now technology is creating abundance.
The convergence of crypto, 3D-printing, and AI is going to create self-sufficient city-states that don't need the government whatsoever. In less than 100 years the nation-state will be an archaic barbaric institution only read about in the history-books. Unfortunately our abusers will not just let us leave peacefully, just like any other abuser.
I guess that's why they call it window pain.
kek
It's a guaranteed war.
I think it's childish and naïve that so many people in crypto think this is going to be a "peaceful" transition. Really? Really!?! Yeah well unless you figure out a way to upload your consciousness to the Internet that's simply not how the world works. As if the most toxic and brutally violent entities across the planet are going to lay down quietly and die. Good one. Not gonna make it.
The first iterations of these physical crypto manifestations are going to be extremely dangerous to live in. They represent the end of federal government, military industrial complex, and rule-by-force. Many of us will be drawn to them for this exact reason, but I would recommend supporting them from outside the city walls unless you want to put your own life on the line. Of course depending on location it could be more dangerous outside of such a city-state depending on where this insane timeline takes us. Just don't run around thinking it's risk-free like LUNA/UST.
Conclusion
The Balkanization and decentralization of governance is coming, and it's going to be an extremely awkward and absolutely ridiculous transition across the board. Every year that goes by governments across the globe fail more and more in their duty to protect and empower their citizens, and at a certain point technology is going to antiquate them. Beware the angry luddites. They can't win but they'll certainly be able to do considerable damage before they lose. sovereignty