Plunder Pie

     Here’s how the game really works. The government doesn’t tax people in order to provide services; they provide services so that the taxing doesn’t look so much like robbery. We are told that the services are the ends, and the taxes are the means. But the reality is the inverse of that — The taxes ARE the end goal.

     The Feds tax the people as much as they possibly can without completely suffocating them. Then they haul all the plunder back to Washington DC, where it gets divided up. Naturally, there is a line of people a mile long wanting a piece of this plunder-pie. The people with the best sounding excuse get to go to the front of the line, and get a bigger piece.

     The Justice System is custom built around getting to the front of that plunder-pie-line. The cops get a slice of pie to go capture the boogieman. The prosecutors get a slice to shame and vilify the boogieman. The public defenders get a slice to limp the boogieman through the process. The judges get a slice to keep up the pretense of due process. The prison guards get a slice to house the boogieman. The probation department gets a slice to supervise the boogieman after everyone else is done with him. The slice itself is the objective. At best, the boogieman is incidental.

     There are literally hundreds of thousands of people whose whole livelihoods are built around using the boogieman as their golden ticket to get to the front of the plunder-pie-line. They live in fear of only two things: The Feds running out of pie, and the world running out of boogiemen. So far, the Feds have been able to plunder enough people to keep the pie flowing. But as the line gets longer, you must compete with other equally shiny golden tickets. Whenever the Justice System gets bumped back in line, the upper management panics, and tells the FBI they better produce some bigger and better boogiemen, or else we all go hungry! There just aren’t very many real actual boogiemen in the world, certainly not enough to keep the machine fed. So for the sake of keeping their business afloat, they have resorted to manufacturing their own pretend monsters.

     This is literally all the FBI does now days. They set up fake scenarios, have their own paid informants role-play the whole thing, then lead some poor sucker into the middle of the LARP game to be arrested and bear the penalty for whatever heinous monstrosity the FBI dreamed up to be the plot of their latest self-aggrandizing street performance. It’s called “security theater” by oldschool cops who look down on the practice. The whole thing is as fake as a plastic banana. But it reliably gets the Justice System to the front of the plunder-pie-line. And they are all addicted to that pie.

     That is why there are so many people in prison in America. No other reason. The prison guards are not here for us; We are here for them. They NEED us. We are their golden ticket to the front of the plunder-pie-line, year after year. If the pie ever runs out, the courts will magically see the light and start believing in second chances, and not giving people decades in prison for petty, victimless crimes.

     As a matter of fact, it’s really none of the government’s business at all. In a free country you get dragged into court for a crime of injury against your neighbor. In a NOT free country you get dragged into court for a crime of disobedience against your government. Think on that.

     Truly “no victim no crime” are words to live by. Anything else is less than self-ownership, less than freedom, and less than human. America has really lost her way chasing after that plunder-pie. Perhaps if we had taken “Thou Shalt Not Steal” to heart we wouldn’t be in this mess.

–Schaeffer Cox 5-31-21