The story of the Trojan horse is a fable about false blessings. Supposedly the Greeks, when at war with the Trojans, could not get inside the city walls of Troy. So they constructed a giant wooden horse and offered it in the name of peace. The Trojans happily hauled the monument inside their city and celebrated their victory. But as we all know, that night the horse’s hollow belly opened up and spilled its store of Greek soldiers, who threw open the city gates and allowed the Greek army to flood in and lay waste to Troy.

Government aid is nearly always a Trojan horse. The Government will always gain access to your earnings and control over your activities with promises to improve your life. These may even be sincere promises, but the end result is the same regardless: you are required to submit a portion of your earnings and a portion of control over your destiny. The first because government has nothing but what it convinces its subjects to surrender; the second because the sole aim of government is to control its subjects. When we lose sight of this fact—that the mechanics of government are always to confiscate its subjects earnings in order to control them—we begin the slide, long or short, toward tyranny.

The American system of government is unique in history—or was unique at its outset—because its authors acknowledged that government was, at best, “a necessary evil.” The assumption behind government is that people are not fit to make wise decisions, so wisdom must be legislated and physically enforced. The authors of the American system, however, cleverly worked in reverse. They outlined basic human rights—the right to privacy, private property, and free movement, expression, and thought—and said these things, and nothing more, were what the government must safeguard. They studiously omitted any idea that government must protect us from ourselves. They studiously omitted the idea that the government must make us like, respect, or be polite to one-another. They knew, as any moderately intelligent person must, that to attempt to enforce opinions or morals through physical force is absurd.

America’s founders were so sincere in their belief that government is “evil” that they took pains to arm American citizens against the government they were creating. Any student of history must see how extraordinary this is. The Second Amendment does not make the case that citizen firepower is necessary to protect us from foreign enemies, but that it is necessary for ensuring a “free state”—that is, ensuring our freedoms from dangers within the state. Acknowledging that guns are frightening machines designed expressly for killing, we must also acknowledge that systematic slaughter, by armed governments against unarmed populaces, left well over 50 million people dead in the 20th century, resoundingly proving the founders’ wisdom. No number of school shootings (against, let’s remember, unarmed victims) can rival the destruction of life and liberty wrought on humanity—by governments—when populations have been disarmed. Despite the clear intent of the Second Amendment, we in America have been undergoing a process of incremental disarming that roughly parallels the processes in Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia, Communist China and Rwanda—to name a few glaring examples—a Trojan horse of a safer world that ignorant citizens have happily hauled inside our city gates.

How many other Trojan horses have gotten past the walls of our Constitution and our Bill of Rights? The Federal Reserve, a promise of economic tranquility, was gladly taken in and soon its store of amoral bankers and ultra-rich money men spilled from its hollow belly and began wreaking havoc. The people got, instead of regulation of the economy, an erratic, nerve-jangling boom and bust cycle—the Great Depression came only sixteen years after the Fed’s induction. We got paper money created out of air, as debt, by private businessmen, until there is so much of this false currency in circulation that today the dollar is virtually valueless—along with our savings and earnings. We got arbitrary manipulation of interest rates that perverts the marketplace and allows a private banker in a high-rise office to determine whether or not tens of millions of working citizens will be able to buy or keep homes for their families.

During the 20th century so many Trojan horses were hauled into our city gates that any modern pretense of our original Constitutional Republic is almost laughable. Public education, the promise to raise the intellectual standard of our youth and our country, has had precisely the opposite effect by all reliable measures. Welfare—the promise to confiscate money from the public at large (or merely create money via the Federal Reserve and make us pay later as debt, interest and inflation) and hand it out to the less fortunate—has almost an ironclad record of failure; the recipients are still cripplingly poor, and are arguably robbed of the incentive to engage their world and improve themselves and their situations. Their job becomes, in effect, maintaining their impoverished status so they continue to receive government checks. (This is not to disparage the idea of charity, only the idea of charity by way of bureaucracy.) Military might—the promise to make us secure by ensuring America’s physical dominance in the world—has been, as it has always been throughout history, one of the handiest devices conceivable for siphoning away our earnings and controlling us through fear (because an outside threat must be ever-present to justify the pursuit of might).

All of these are expressions of the rule that government is evil. It’s best intentioned programs, carried out by its best intentioned administrators, are mired in inefficiency and bureaucracy. Why? Because by creating its own monopoly on education, energy, charity, economics, etc., etc., it automatically destroys the human dynamic. It replaces creativity, competition, and individual incentive with a massive, lumbering machine that systematically consumes public funds and is only required to give pleasant promises in return.

And this in the best of circumstances. This is when the Trojan horse is offered with genuine good will and the soldiers ride in on top of it, smiling, intent on drawing their swords and forcing the citizens to accept help.

In the worst of circumstances, the Trojan horse is offered in the same spirit as it was offered by the Greeks to the people of Troy. It is a crass deception. We can watch this take place in society after society in the 20th century. What tyrant hasn’t promised safety and an end to poverty or inequality? What tyrant hasn’t besieged his people with romantic notions of national greatness? What tyrant hasn’t rallied his people against an outside threat, and then put the military machine into overdrive, always for the good of the common citizen, national greatness, eventual safety … ?

We find ourselves today with possibly the greatest Trojan horse we’ve ever witnessed standing in the public square: The War on Terror. Many, many of us—easily the majority—see it for what it is: flagrant oppression of the American public wrapped in a flowery promise of safety. We must consent to be monitored, tagged with national IDs, to have our homes invaded; even to have certain of our citizens arrested and held without trial and possibly executed … all of these overtly fascist laws are now a reality, brought to us by the same people who insist, paradoxically, that it is our very freedom that invites terrorism.

Further—always in the name of safety with a generous helping of national greatness—we have started a process of aggressive wars. The promise is to pull up terrorism by its roots, where it grows; however, the least bit of reflection brings us to the glaring conclusion that it can only create thousands more terrorists … just as you or I would become the most vehement and brutal of terrorists if Iraqi soldiers were swaggering up American streets with assault rifles, threatening the lives and futures of our wives and children.

The only thing debatable about the Trojan horse of safety from terrorism, is if it was foisted upon us as a crass deception or with genuine goodwill.

I will only offer this: We are instructed, even hounded, by our media and our government, to fear Muslim terrorists. And this same government allows an estimated three million Mexican illegals to flood into our country every year. Whatever your position on illegal immigration, you must acknowledge that Mexicans are very similar in appearance to the Arabic people we are required to live in fear of. Al-Qaeda members could don sombreros and ponchos and come into America, by way of Mexico, literally by the thousand if not tens of thousands—all unseen and undocumented. They could assemble armies throughout America. They could become an all but irresistible force once they took action. If you accept that Muslim extremists are rabid to destroy this country, then you also must accept that our border with Mexico is the greatest threat to our national security. We must ask why we must lose our basic human rights and sacrifice our children in wars overseas, supposedly in the interest of keeping our “homeland” safe, when our government resolutely refuses to protect us from the most obvious and dangerous threat.

The only logical conclusions are either 1) that our government does not want to protect us from terrorism at all, or 2) that the terrorist threat is exaggerated or even under the command of our government—why else, when the open border with Mexico is a virtual red carpet for terrorists, do we not have a new 9/11 every week?

But I digress. We are discussing the nature of government—evil. So America’s founders resolutely believed, and so all observation of all governments throughout history resoundingly backs. The greatest human joy isn’t safety or security. We are reasoning animals and our greatest joy is therefore achievement, self-betterment, creativity . . . The government absolutely cannot offer these things. In fact, the only thing it can do, by its nature, is detract from them in the name of safety and security. The trick is—as our founding fathers well knew—to give the government just enough authority to afford us necessary and reasonable safety and security, but to always watch the government closely because all governments, everywhere, throughout history, seek to overstep their bounds. And the Trojan horse they always ride into our pockets and our lives is the promise of safety and security—from inequality, from ignorance, from poverty, from economic turmoil, from our neighbors, from sickness, from vice, from foreign threats … And they are able to deliver real results … very close to never.

But when the horse’s belly falls open and the agents drop to the ground and set to work, government’s record for delivering oppression, fear, brutality and tyranny is stellar.

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