Imagine you own a farm and one of your neighbors regularly trespasses onto your property and kills some of your livestock every few days. By the time you’re aware that one of your animals is dead, it’s got vultures picking at it and making a mess. You scare them away and clean up the carcass, but after a few days, you’re met with the same scene. And it keeps happening.
Your neighbor is a jerk. You’re mad that he keeps trespassing and destroying your property. But you also don’t like seeing the vultures milling around your farm. So you take some steps to scare the vultures away and make it more difficult for them to get to any dead animals. You have some success here and there but you’re only treading water. To make it even worse, you end up holding the vultures in more and more contempt when you would otherwise not care much about them.
And that makes you an idiot.
You might have good reason to be annoyed at the vultures, but they’re ultimately not the problem. Your problem would be solved if you fixed the root cause: your neighbor is killing your livestock. In this example, this is brutally obvious.
Let’s examine a less obvious case: immigration. If you hold that too many people are immigrating to the United States (or any other country) because they’re in search of welfare and other free stuff, how does restricting their movement solve the problem? And to claim that the immigrant is the one who is committing the theft via taxation (or is at least largely responsible for it) only serves to cloud your ability to identify and deal with the real aggressor, the state.
Or think about refugees. Surely it’s not the refugee’s fault that some government is engaging in horrific bombing campaigns on his homeland. You will never solve your apparent immigration “problem” if you focus on blocking refugees from entering your country.
Figuring out how to keep your neighbor from killing your chickens is orders of magnitude easier than preventing the state from handing out welfare, taxing income, and engaging in monstrous foreign policies. As an individual, you have virtually no shot at effecting much change in the state. But ignoring the root cause and focusing on battling symptoms guarantees that you will always lose especially if your proposed solution involves empowering the state even more.
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