Blanket Coercion
Imagine if every single time people in government had an idea to get involved in our lives, they had to tax us directly for it. Imagine that they had to make a proposal to us explaining how much money they would like to take from us, what choices and responsibilities they would take from us, and what benefits we would purportedly receive. Imagine we had the opportunity to approve or reject all of these proposals.
Any time agents of government wanted to start a war, start a new agency, give a subsidy to their friends, increase regulations, or hire more people to their ranks, they would have to get it approved by the humans who live in that society. Imagine that if the agents running any government program desired more money to run that operation than was previously allocated, they had to go back again and repeat the same process.
Imagine that in this way, it was relatively simple to know the cost of government because it was felt in the most direct and immediate way possible by everyone and could be weighed against whatever benefits were perceived to be showering down upon us.
This imaginary world is of course nothing like the one where we actually live, here in the US in 2025. The condition we live with is what I call blanket coercion. In this system, the government taxes us first, then the government agents deliberate about what to do with the resources. It is taken for granted that the government absorbs a large amount of the life energy of our society, and that it will continue to absorb more and more. If the government in that imaginary world behaved like a servant of its peoples’ conscience, intelligence, best judgement, and wisdom, our government behaves like a ruler which progressively seeks to control us. How did we get into this position? What are the mechanics working inside this picture we’re living in? What does it really mean for us?
Government, Money, and Choice
Remember that the government is the centralized unit of physical force in a society. It is the agency of violence and coercion. Physical force produces nothing. As such, a government has no productive capacity of its own. No government has ever committed a productive or creative act, and no government ever will. Even if the government ends up running enterprises like railroads or steel mills, it has simply taken over productive capacity that already existed (and it won’t exist for long). Even if the government started a railroad from scratch, it would still do it with resources taken from people that could have been used for infinite other things – in the total picture, nothing new is produced. A government can take on life only by drawing it from the society in which it has been instantiated.
How does it take on life? For societies today, the answer is that it absorbs money. It's of the utmost importance to be clear about the nature of money in regard to this condition.
Once a society begins using money (which seems inevitable as the scale of its exchange increases to a certain magnitude), it becomes like the blood running through the circulatory system that is that society’s network of exchange. Money is the carrier of incalculable amounts of information about peoples’ values, preferences, and decisions. Money becomes the representative of people’s economic energy, and thereby in a sense, the representative of their time and life energy as well.
When it comes down to it, what does it mean for a person to have a lot of money? All other things being equal, more money simply means more choices. Less money means less choices. Less choice about where you work, what food you eat, where you live, where you can travel, what school you send your kids to, what clubs you join, and four thousand other things.
The more choices you have, the more responsibility you have. Every choice is an opportunity to express your values. You will experience the consequences of those choices and learn to refine your values through time.
The Nature of Blanket Coercion
A centralization of money is actually a centralization of choice, and a centralization of choice is actually a centralization of responsibility. Therefore, we can look at every tax as an attempt to transfer responsibilities from some people to other people (mainly centralizing them with government agents). It would be damaging enough to live with a group of anti-social people who constantly wanted to introduce new ways of taking away our responsibility, and occasionally convincing us to go along with one or two of these schemes.
However, we’ve progressed far beyond that. We’ve got blanket coercion. We are in a state of affairs where common people are not even given a choice about which choices we would like to give up.
Blanket coercion is made manifest and is really symbolized by two things: income tax and inflation. These compose blanket coercion because they are general and purposeless. Income tax is taken from citizens on the premise that in general, the government should be responsible for a certain portion of peoples’ choices. That some areas of life are too important for individual people to be expressing their own values. There is no defined purpose yet assigned to that money (it could be spent on any government program).
As mentioned, inflation also exhibits the characteristics of generality and purposelessness, however, it is infinitely more odious, owing account to some of its extra spicy features.
Inflation is devastating because most people don’t understand what it is. Most people don’t realize that it’s a form of outright theft – no different in essence than someone from the government reaching right into your bank account and extracting money. You can read 200 books about money and inflation. You’ll see many truths and many lies. The purpose of this article isn’t to dive deep in that sea, so here it will be kept simple: Inflation occurs when first a government forces a civilization to use one money only, then proceeds to inflate the supply of that money, thereby devaluing it and redistributing wealth to its chosen recipients. In the end it functions almost exactly the same as a tax. This is why many call inflation a hidden tax.
So, with inflation, to the degree people don’t understand it, we have people not realizing that they are having a portion of their choices taken away, let alone which choices will be taken away. At least with income tax everyone understands they’re having their wealth expropriated from them, even if they don’t know what the government will do with it. Inflation is simply a deeper layer of control.
On the “What is Money” show, Robert Breedlove and Michael Saylor put forth that money is the “highest form of energy that human beings can channel.” In keeping with this idea, I submit that money is the greatest carrier of violence in the world.
Controlling money is the most powerful way ever conceived to control other people and take away their responsibility. It is the surest method to limit the expression of individual values and impose centralized values on everyone. This makes it the crown jewel of all spiritual crimes.
Blanket coercion is a way of dulling people’s senses. If proposals were made to common people every time someone in government wanted to tax us for a new project, we would all have to think about it every time and weigh our options. However, when the money is simply taken, our thinking muscles atrophy. People begin to simply get used to having their resources, choices, and responsibility limited as a normal way of life, until a generation comes along that doesn’t even know that it wasn’t always like this. We’re well past that point in 2025.
Blanket coercion is a system that treats human beings like cattle. When our money is limited to the point that we’re struggling just to make ends meet, working at jobs we don’t care about, and able to make future plans only with great difficulty, we’re in survival mode. Blanket coercion has the effect of keeping us in this state while more “enlightened” people (politicians and bureaucrats) handle the higher, more delicate, moral concerns for us. It is a system of rulers and ruled. That’s what it means to centralize values. It means you get to make less and less important choices about your life, and people in government make more and more important choices about your life.
Wrapping Up
We have to be careful about how we proceed from here. The government is not a bad thing, and neither is any person working for the government a bad person. That being said, we have a bad relationship with our government right now. Blanket coercion is an unambiguous attack on the freedom, personal autonomy, intellect, and dignity of all citizens. It should be ended as quickly as possible, because the more money government gets, the more it can get. The more powerful it becomes, the more powerful it can become. Like a parasite sucking the life out of its host, it becomes stronger and stronger as the host becomes weaker and weaker.
The Trump Administration and the DOGE should not be trusted to make any long-term impact on the intrusion of government into our lives. It may reduce some obvious wasted resources, but it has no foundation in the principle that human beings should make their own choices (which means not being involuntarily taxed). Rest assured that it is not about restoring personal responsibility and individual freedom; it’s largely a tool serving the personal agendas in the current political administration.
Furthermore, in the pattern of our current political duopoly, this administration will likely be replaced by one which will undo a great deal of its efforts, thereby achieving the same results the duopoly always achieves – nothing truly important.
How can we scale down blanket coercion and progressively restore greater individual freedom and responsibility in the US? My suggestions should come as no surprise.
Separate the government from money completely.
a. This means the repeal of all legal tender laws and the restoration of peoples’ natural right to choose their own money(s).
b. This means abolishing the Federal Reserve completely.
c. This means the government having no involvement with interest rates, money supply, or regulating financial institutions.
End income tax.
a. This includes both Federal and State income tax.
If you don’t hear these options being seriously considered in our public discourse and in discussions of political office holders, you can be sure that blanket coercion isn’t going anywhere.