Governments Cause Anarchy

Phew... after three rainy weekends in a row, it was high time today for the first Great Violet Massacre of the spring (more commonly referred to as "lawnmowing").

The sun finally came out when I'd almost finished massacring the front violets as luck would have it, and just when I was ready to take a breather before tackling the back - which is more like a second front yard than a proper back yard, a fact that I find more annoying each year. Repeated attempts to "naturalize" the back portion of my property have failed, although other parts of the lawn seem ready and willing to oblige. Plants don't take marching orders, and it takes a good deal of kindly persuasion to get them to grow where they don't want to - or a fair amount of unfriendly treatment to prevent them from growing where you don't want them to.

Lawnmowing time for me, like driving time, is often productive thinking time, and the subject line of this post popped into my head again. A while back, I'd thought it might be a good title for an essay which I haven't found time to write. Governments cause anarchy like spring rain and warmth cause flowers and grass to grow, by creating the necessary conditions. Naturally, I can't speak for other anarchists, but it seems reasonable to think that most individualist anarchists have embraced the anarchist philosophy more or less directly as a result of experiences with and observations of government at work.

Bureaucratic procedures are so obviously clumsy and inefficient compared with the spontaneous creativity of the free market, that it seems analogous to the relationship between my clunky old lawnmower and the forces of nature. Every year, I massacre the violets, dandelions and seedlings that spring up to compete with the grass, and with every passing year there are more violets (etc) and less grass. That's heartening, I think, because that's what the government is up against in the long run. Despite all government's pretensions toward omniscience and omnipotence, the bigger it gets the more effectively it seems to tie itself in knots. Like my clunky old lawnmower against the forces of nature, government simply can't kill off market competition - what government can and does do is legislate against free trade, and drive more and more market activity underground.

I detest this "Real ID" Act, and perhaps its passing does reflect a defining moment... I've personally felt so overwhelmed with immediate concerns recently that perhaps its importance hasn't borne in on me completely. On the other hand, while it's apparently a significant and ominous development I suspect that the cloud will have a silver lining. The way I look at it, in passing the Patriot Act, the Real ID Act, and other unpopular measures, government forces are absurdly attempting to control the irrepressible forces of nature. In the long run, I feel hopeful... after all, I have every faith in the forces of nature and very little in government. Like my old lawnmower, government will experience mechanical failures and eventually become obsolete... like nature, the free market will flourish in spite of governments. Not to say I'd want to stick my fingers under the lawnmower while its blades are turning any more than I'd welcome a SWAT team or an IRS audit... or a "Real ID." Those blades may not be sharp, but they can do a lot of damage nonetheless - much like bureaucratic or political thinking.

On the bright side, reckless government actions appear to be creating the right conditions for a whole new bumper crop of anarchists, and that means reinforcements may be on the way for freedom fighters on the front lines. Perhaps I'm being overly optimistic here, but I'm tired enough to hope for dawn to dispell the darkness when things appear to appear very dark indeed from a freedom loving perspective. For that matter, daylight is wasting - I'd better get back outside and attempt to subdue the forces of nature with my cranky old lawnmower for the umpteen-hundredth time, even if only for the first time this spring. Later on, I'll devote more time to catching up on Real ID, and overdue email responses for which I apologize to a number of people... it's just felt like "one of those weeks" for at least two weeks now. :(