A wannabe chief somewhere (probably in central Africa) battered the existing chief to a pulp. Wondering why he’d done it, one of the others not called chiefs (hereinafter referred to as The Indians) either signed or said, “Was that really necessary?” The de facto new chief asked, “You want some of this?” “Nope” the Indian replied. “Good” the chief continued, “Because I’m the man to protect you against this sort of thing”.

Thus was government born. And as quite a few people fancied the job, politics wasn’t long in coming.

In short order, making laws, fighting other tribes and boredom with hunting mammoths produced silks, senior army officers, and the civil service.

Around this time, a few of the brighter Indians asked “What’s the point of all this crapola, given we’re all gonna die anyway? Let’s fire all these hangers-on in funny wigs and uniforms and you know, just have a good time”.

Well, they got burnt at the stake, and right there, State religion got off the ground. From organised religion in turn came tithes to appease the Gods and feed the priests.

“That’s a good idea” said the chiefs (hereinafter referred to as The Establishment). So now we had taxes to fight wars, build prisons, hang dissenters etc etc. And it wasn’t even AD yet.

In the three thousand years following the invention of tax as a means of maintaining the fiction that people couldn’t you know, just have a good time, it took the Chief-King-Parliament-bureaucrat Establishment a mere 2912 of those years to get round to the idea of maybe spending some of the tax on the welfare of the taxpayers.

The only reason they did anything even then was first, one of their prisons got razed to the ground by poor people with no underpants. Then not long after that, other folks were asked to turn up for one of the wars, minus only the weapons, ammunition and helmets. This was the first example of a government Tsar screwing up all the arrangements.

It was also the beginning of revolutions and, shortly afterwards, Student Politics. Man would no longer exploit man; now, it would work the other way round.

These new ‘Left’ Utopias produced new Establishments bringing with them one big step forward: the all-providing State. A State, in fact, seemingly able to consistently provide queues, grit shortages, wine lakes, plus a bountiful supply of Brussels Sprouts, Treaties and Statutory Instruments.

Interestingly, the ‘Right’ Utopian Establishment also brought new chiefs to the top table, along with their giant leap: the all-trickling Globalism. This too would provide for everyone via the incontinent wealth of a small minority: people called banker, Bush, Bernanke, Brown and (if only for variety) GM-food, GM-cars, Greenspan, Goldman Sachs, Gordon and Goodwin. It was a narrow elite, and they were way, way beyond the chiefs, monarchs and fuhrers of the past: for they were Masters of the Universe.

They could create everlasting booms. They could spend and never pay. They could make the toxic terrific, and manufacture one, unassailable single currency by recycling twenty-seven varieties of toilet paper. They could take amazing technology capable of education and liberation, and adapt it to an ingenious means of mass distraction and brain destruction.

One by one, they performed miracles: Greenspan created cash from nothing, Bush fashioned electoral victory from what looked to the audience like defeat, and greatest delusionist of them all Brown made the Bank of England’s gold disappear entirely.

But one day, their new paradigm became “Buddy can you spare a dime?” And those with a Degree in History gained before 1990 said, “You know, this all feels terribly familiar somehow”.

And they were right. Once more a few dumb, violent, idle, myopic, pig-ignorant Chiefs were dependent on the money left among the Indians…despite have taken and borrowed everything else off them in the first place. Once more there were bogey-men against whom the Indians needed protection. Once more, in fact, there was no alternative.

And that’s how, between 1789 and 1969 we at last gained our long-promised freedoms – only to lose them all again between 1969 and 2009.

Maybe all this is inevitable, but I’d like to think it isn’t.

I’m not saying there’s no need for government and business and finance: I merely wish to suggest, ever so humbly, that there is an alternative to nothing but Big government, Big business, Big bourses and Globalist banking.

I’m only confirming what a gigantically breathtaking scam the whole edifice of bureaucratic government and undemocratic business is. What undiluted lunatics Milton Friedman and all his adoring fans are. How lazy, unthinking, incompetent and insolvent every regime in history has always been.

And that pointing this out does not render one an obvious case for close surveillance – and/or counterfeit psychiatric diagnoses.

Copyright John Ward January 2010