A Slight Breakthrough

I had a breakthrough with one of my statist conspecifics the other day at lunch. I was complaining that my town spent tax dollars on frivolities like Christmas trees and lights, and one woman remarked that she liked it when her town had those things. I asked her if she liked it so much that she would be willing to hire armed goons to shake her neighbors down for the money to do it. Another conspecific chimed in and said that my characterization was unfair because, as he put it, “you can say thing about anything government does”. “Precisely!” said I. We should have the state do only those things that we consider so important that we would be willing to set goons on our neighbors to get them done. “That’s the problem with democracy,” mused my conspecific. “We don’t think about what we are doing in those terms.” This is as close as I have ever come to getting my conspecifics to understand where I am coming from in my anti-government stance.