State of Contradiction

By Crispin Sartwell

In Maryland, as in many other states, the government, running a deficit, is considering various expansions of state-regulated gambling as a way to generate revenue. The state already runs a variety of numbers games, and now proposes to add slot machines.

In Pennsylvania, where I live, it is impossible to buy any alcoholic beverage more potent than beer except from a state-run liquor store.

Most states generate revenue from high tobacco taxes, as well as from lawsuits against tobacco companies.

The most profitable commodity to manufacture, all other things being equal, is the addictive substance. Once hooked, people will pay and pay again. And they will tend to use more and more. This is a principle well understood by drug cartels, neighborhood crack dealers, liquor wholesalers, big tobacco, and politicians.

All the states have anti-smoking campaigns. And all the have an economic stake in smoking. Governments have immense campaigns to eradicate the use of illegal intoxicants, and immense profits from the ones they legitimize. The politician feels and seeks to cure your pain, and feeds off it parasitically.

States frankly advertise and promote their own gambling operations. To a large extent they have been successful in supplanting the numbers runners with their own bureaucrats. It is a familiar point that as a form of taxation, gambling is regressive. But that's because the lotteries feed off people's addiction and desperation. If people were better off financially, lotteries would be less profitable: they actually give the state a stake in impoverishing its citizens, and a mechanism for doing so.

If they really want to balance the budget, I would strongly suggest that the states explicitly enter the sex trade and the porn business; they would do so, of course, in the name of public hygiene.

The sin tax is a miniature version of a general problem. The state is essentially self-aggrandizing: like almost any organization it seeks to expand continuously and indefinitely, and unlike many other kinds of organization, it succeeds almost uniformly. It provides public services, but it does so by a parasitism that often makes those services necessary in the first place. It devours the people it serves

Government anti-drug campaigns have taken to emphasizing the connection of illegal drugs to terrorism. Covert government pro-drug campaigns encourage the contributions of illegal drugs to causes the government supports: the Fujimori government of Peru, anti-Taliban elements in Afghanistan, the Nicaraguan contras. Street drug sales, too, are taxed: they contain the price of payoffs to and collusions with governments, and of interdiction and eradication efforts. They pay the salaries of bureaucrats.

The state repairs our roads, educates us, and manufactures us as its dependents. It keeps us secure and endangers us, defends our freedoms and enslaves us. We need it, and it seeks to hold us in that need and to expand it, seeks to make our need pervasive and continuous and then satisfy it. It has nothing but what it takes, and expands in an infinite loop, taking its cut from every transaction. Its public servants are the enemies and the impresarios of pain, poverty, and degradation. Taxation is charity and confiscation.

In one sense, the state is a business: its lifeblood is its revenue stream, and so there is entrepreneurship and a hunger for profit. It competes with drug cartels and casino operators and health care systems uniformly, though with the great advantage of police and military machinery.

At times the functions of the state are flatly, explicitly contradictory. Consider, for example, the purposes of the Departments of Defense and Health and Human Services: the state pursues together wellness and the means of mass annihilation. It has twin mandates to serve and to regulate businesses, either and both of which are intended also to increase its own power and size.

We would do well to consider these basic facts as we plunge once more into a presidential election cycle, in which we will "take back our country" or create "a land of opportunity for all Americans." At the essence of the organization that will perform such prodigies is the contradiction that will take away what it gives us, discourage what it avows, destroy the village to pacify it, give us what we need and take what we have.

The terms on which the contradiction is negotiated can be extremely important, as important as the difference between war and peace. But whatever its content, the contradiction itself lives and grows.

Whoever is elected and whatever they say, the political state will grow in all directions and be gnawed hollow by the contradiction at its center. It will fight the evil that besets us, and it will be that evil.

Crispin Sartwell's latest book is "Extreme Virtue: Truth and Leadership in Five Great American Lives" (SUNY 2003).