The hate and fear of the government is something that is particularly interesting in modern day society. You're supposed to love the flag, but you're supposed to hate the government. It a massive contradiction.
But if you're sitting in a PR office, you can figure it out.Get people to be patriotic, subordinate, silent, hate government, blame government for everything that goes wrong, think governments can do nothing right, not notice that more and more power is being turned over to private hands, which are completely unaccountable and are totally totalitarian institutions.
People are unhappy. A lot of things are going wrong with their lives. Real income is going down, working hours are going up, families are falling apart, a lot of bad things. And we've been taught for 50 years that it's the government's fault, so we bomb a government building, but we don't bomb the GE headquarters, we don't read the Fortune 500 and find out who's got all the money, we don't notice that they've just celebrated their fourth straight year of double digit profit growth.
The great defect with the government is that, in theory, and sometimes in practice, the citizens can influence it. Meaning have control over it. That's dangerous.
Actually this whole discussion over the Swiss getting some form of subsistence living is quite telling of the hate of democracy. This "getting paid to be alive" is nothing new, as they say, but the truth is that for a large part of history it was actually practiced. Right after the downfall of feudalism, there were a set of laws enacted, collectively known as the "
poor laws" and one feature was the "right to live", which held that each citizen had a right to life, and that the state had a vested interest in protecting that right. So they were given a form of subsistence living, what we might call welfare today.
But with the rise of the system of private capitalist industrialization, that right had to be destroyed: people had to have it knocked out of their heads that they had any automatic "right to live" beyond what they could win for themselves on the labor market. And that was the main point of classical economics.
