Tutorial

Account

Forums

Monday, July 07, 2008

A Speech for Rulers to Give

Following is a speech I recommend that every leader of every country give.  It was inspired by various self-sustaining religious groups and so-called “underdeveloped” cultures.

Ladies and gentlemen, I would like to apologize for encouraging you to depend on your government.  I realize now that you are human beings, capable of taking care of yourselves.  You understand what can hurt you.  If you need the services we provide, you’re smart enough to purchase them.  By forcing these services on you and taxing you to cover their cost, we’ve prevented you from making the choices that show us the difference between valuable services and wasteful ones.  We’ve also fooled many of you into thinking they are free while really, they create a tremendous drag on the economy.

I also need to apologize for taking advantage of your foolish desire to avoid growing up.  Many of you expect us to provide you with jobs, welfare, medical care, and all manner of other great things that a healthy society provides.  These things don’t come from us.  That was a lie started a long time ago and those who see right through it haven’t been brave enough or able to tolerate enough pain to let the rest of you know.  These great things actually come from you.  In fact, by taking taxes away from you to pay our salaries and then pretending that we’re creating and providing these services, we’re doing a lot of damage to an otherwise healthy society.  Our only service is to enforce the laws we make up and you do the rest of it.  We’ve really been holding you down.  Sorry about that.

I stand before you today, ashamed of having taken so long to point these things out.  If you want educated children, the right way to accomplish that is not by forcing other people to pay for it, but by setting an example.  Educate them yourself, or encourage or pay others to educate them.  Education here has largely been an effort to crush the independent nature of a maturing adult so that we have sheep-like citizens who don’t question our policies.  The repercussions of this horrible behavior have become unbearable, so I would like now to say a few words about what I call “true education,” something we have gone to great lengths to suppress in the past.

Teach others to question things.  Let them try to do things if they want, and be there for them in case they fail.  Once you have explained what you think is the right way to do something, don’t waste any effort stopping them from doing something else.  The fastest way for people to learn that you are right is by trying something different and failing.  This is the kind of behavior that produces light.  Thomas Edison did it to create the lightbulb, and you can do it to fix the damage we’ve done.  It’s also the only way we’ll ever find out if there’s a better way.

Finally, I’d like to apologize for making you all pay for our efforts to create and enforce laws.  About 95% of the laws we enforce benefit very small groups within our society and often harm the rest.  Did you know that we spend about 99% of our law enforcement resources on these marginally beneficial laws?  And often, they do more harm than good.  So we have eliminated the laws requiring citizens to financially support the government.  (pause for applause)... Citizens are now encouraged to choose how much financial support they would like to provide to our various areas of law enforcement.  Please submit donations to your representatives and let them know what services you would like to support.  We have no idea how strong good people will be without the burden of taxation crushing them, but we’re sure that their ability to improve things all around will prove far greater than ours, simply because we’re finally giving them a choice over power.

Thank you, and good night.