Someone around these parts mentioned this bit from “The Life of Brian” a few days ago, and the tea baggers partiers have been in the news lately, so it was on my mind.
All right… all right… but apart from better sanitation and medicine and education and irrigation and public health and roads and a freshwater system and baths and public order… what have the Romans done for us?
It’s a very funny bit, but do keep in mind that the Romans were the occupying army and government. Republicans might be interested in co-opting the thing and applying it to Iraq, not that I’d agree. Contextually, it would be more on the mark.
Splitter!
Romans were NOT occupiers! They were liberators and protectors. It’s all in one’s definition of terms. ;)
HOW many Romans?!?
Love the sketch, and it’s still funny and clever to apply it to today.
However, to make it fit to the crazy libertarians of today (like me), it might be something more like, “What have the Romans ever done for us that we couldn’t have done better ourselves, in a more ethical manner?”
But Libertarians, isn’t government supposed to be ourselves? If collective action is to be taken, where should it occur, if not in government?
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[Re-posted. Lost?]
There is no choice but to either run our own government, or to be run by it at someone else’s hands. It ain’t going away. We’ll never do away with government any more than we will do away with courts or laws, and for the same reasons. Would the problems they are meant to deal with simply go away if courts & laws went away? We support them because we need them. And they need us; they couldn’t function without our support, active or passive. We can’t avoid supporting the law, the courts or the government, actively or passively. There is no place far enough out in the woods for that any more. If we fail to participate actively in governing ourselves, we are passively supporting laws & courts and a government that doesn’t represent us and therefore cannot work; not for most of us, anyway. We must participate actively, or nothing works, for us. “Conservatives” either don’t get this, or their leaders pretend they don’t get it in order to keep the rest of us from exercising the power which we have vested in government. That leaves all that power to those who do choose to exercise it, our self-styled corporate masters. In advocating the impossible, the withering away of the State, “conservatives” are simply giving it up without a fight. No wonder the corporations support them. But why do “conservatives” support the corporations?
(Continued at my blog. Too long for here.)
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oops
wrong thread
so sorry
please delete these two posts
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eclecticvibe,
There is an entire literature on that question (public choice) and I am only beginning to read it. Even if I was well-read, I doubt I’d go into it too deep in this comment thread. Since I am not well-read in it yet, I’m just going to point out that the literature exists and kindly shut my mouth.
Crosses….they forgot about crosses…..which gave us Mel Gibson;-)
eclecticvibe,
In some cosmic alignment, act of God, twist of fate or extreme coincidence, this article was published today which directly (and I mean directly) addresses your question to libertarians regarding self-government.
http://mises.org/story/3383
I am not an anarchist, and that leaves me even more dismayed at the problems presented by discussions of public choice and the shortcomings of representative democracy. I am encouraged, however, by Mises’s less idealistic comments on the institution of democracy, not as necessarily a solution that will produce an optimum society, but at least as a means of peaceful transition. (see Socialism, Chapter 3 here)
Of course, Mises wrote this before the world had witnessed Hitler.