Marriage Equality and Social Justice: How to Properly Distract Tax-Victims.
Suppose we define a word “tax” as the involuntary confiscation of another’s justly acquired property. Suppose further a world in which their are two classes of people: tax-collectors and tax-victims. Next, suppose that both tax-collectors and tax-victims desire to better their human condition, mainly by acquiring material wealth. Social Justice, Marriage Equality, and human welfare may be analyzed as follows.
Tax-collectors desire to obtain the property of their tax-victims. Rather than offer goods or services in exchange to voluntarily obtain the property of tax-victims, tax-collectors resort to tax-collecting (see the definition above). Tax-victims dislike losing their property to tax-collectors (see the benefits of accumulating property above). Thus, there is inherent conflict between tax-collectors and tax-victims, the latter fearing and resisting the actions of the former.
In order to maximize the quantity of property that the tax-collector may seize from the tax-victim, it is in the tax-collector’s favor to distract the tax-victim’s attention away from his property. This will make the tax-collector’s activities easier to carry out and will yield greater confiscation.
Fortunately for the tax-collector, the tax-victims have developed an obsession with “social justice.” Social Justice is the state of affairs in which immaterial, subjective conditions, such as “equality” and “fairness” reign over all. No doubt, the tax-collector has encouraged–implicitly and explicitly–that the tax-victims adopt a desire to achieve the mystical Social Justice. Why is that? Because Social Justice distracts tax-victims from their property.
In fact, it is in the tax-collectors favor to implement rules that corrupt the natural order of his tax-victims. For example, he may proclaim that tax-victims must seek the official written approval (euphemistically: a “license” from other tax-beneficiaries (euphemistically: “judges”) for interpersonal relationships. The tax-collector may go further and organize his system of tax-collecting such that those tax-victims who do seek and acquire this license are subject to less taxation than other, single tax-victims.
As a violent, coercive agent, the tax-collector has become very skilled at violently punishing refusal to submit to his dictates. Therefore, the tax-victim faces this schedule of costs: direct rebellion against the tax-collector–high cost, submission to the tax-collectors dictates–lesser cost, acquiring this license and entering into cohabitation with another tax-victim–least cost. Unsurprisingly, very few tax-victims select the first option, some select the second, and many are incentivized to select the third.
But the tax-collector must have conflict in society in order to sustain a certain level of distraction away from his tax-victims’ property. Therefore, the institution of this licensing program for cohabitation cannot be afforded to everyone. There must be in-equality in order for those who have adopted a favorable view of Social Justice to be concerned over. These conflicting organizational rules will serve as problems to be solved by the tax-collector in the future. In other words, the tax-collector is incentivized to create problems that only he or his associates may solve in order to achieve Social Justice, a concept the tax-collector himself supports in the first place.
Throughout this entire scheme, the tax-collector is satisfied so long as his revenue exceeds his costs of collection. The sexuality, status of interpersonal relationships, status of cohabitation, and happiness of his victims is irrelevant to the extent that these feelings do not provoke tax-collection resistance. This is a vital point. Questions of Social Justice must never consider the morality of tax-collection. If suddenly Social Justice theory concerned itself with the morality of aggressive violence or coercive extraction of wealth, the tax-collector’s entire scheme would be thwarted. No, questions of Social Justice must always deal with other issues in order to serve the purposes of the tax-collector.
However, it is helpful if the tax-victims think that the tax-collector actually cares about the personal happiness or relationship status of the tax-victims. For this reason, the tax-collector will refer to his victims as something less abrasive than “victim.” For a while, the tax-collector may use the term “subject.” Ah, but this term still carries a hint of subjugation, and the tax-victim must not be lead to feel subjugated or oppressed; after all, this increases the chance of resistance, increases the cost of tax-collection, and decreases total tax profit. “Citizen” sounds much nicer.
Every so often the tax-collector must embark on a particular campaign to distract his tax-victim-citizens due to particularly indefensible tax-collector activities, as with war and the implementation of new “fast-track” tax-collection authority (like with so-called trade agreements). The tax-collector has prepared for this. He has already sewn conflict into the fabric of society, so that there exists problems that only he can solve. Upon implementation of the solution of these tax-collector-caused problems by the tax-collector, the tax-victim-citizen will be thoroughly distracted. And the tax collection may proceed.
An example of a proper distraction of this sort may be the expansion of allowable applicants for cohabitation licenses, which at this point have come to serve as affirmations of relationship status. In the vernacular of Social Justice, the tax-collector may choose to call this distraction campaign “Marriage Equality,” a very desirable thing to the Social Justice advocates, whom may be called Social Justice Warriors (the use of war-like vocabulary as with “warriors” is a good hint as to the source of ideas, in this case the tax-collector, but tax-victim-citizens are always encouraged to disregard this).
Ideally, tax-victim-citizens will feel duly compensated for their loss of property (and with it, privacy) by the tax-collector in the name of Social Justice. After successfully deluding and confusing the tax-victim-citizen into believing that the reign of mythical Social Justice can adequately compensate for or excuse the destruction of whatever personal liberty the tax-victim-citizen may once have had, the tax-collector has the best of both worlds. Namely, his victim-citizens have been stupefied into accepting lower standards of living and human welfare via tax-theft, and tax-revenues jump to all-time highs. In this case, the tax-collector may be very pleased with his work.