When serfs become 'customers'

When serfs become 'customers'

By Becky Akers

Are we subjects of political government — or its "consumers" and "customers"?

As the American state at all levels subsumes more industries, everything from providing homes to renting us bicycles and campsites, bureaucrats increasingly refer to those paying their salaries as "customers" or "consumers." For example, the Thieves and Sexual Assailants (TSA) who infest airports dedicate a page of their website to "Customer Service," as if the poor saps waiting in endless lines would rather miss their flights than a good grope.

Ditto for the socialist sewage of Obummercare. Americans are "customers" and "consumers" rather than taxpayers obliged to finance a nationalized insurance scam.

Perhaps most infuriating of all, the IRS speaks of its victims in the same terms. It doesn't hire extortionists and leg-breakers but "Customer Service Representatives."

Such jargon as "customer service" typifies our smarmy culture, one that prefers euphemisms over truth; it's only natural that Leviathan, which lies about everything all the time, would so describe its leeches. Yet the implication that we are government's "customers" ravages not only the English language but liberty as well.

The dictionary defines "customer" as "a person who purchases goods or services from another; buyer; patron," Foundational to that concept is freedom. We obtain hamburgers and haircuts, computers and car-washes because we value and need them, not because someone held a gun to our heads. Indeed, when compulsion corrupts a commercial transaction, such as the Mob's strong-arming a business into hiring it for trash-removal, all of us — including the government — call it a crime. The State even prosecutes it as such.

So how do bureaucrats and politicians get away with coercing our patronage? Simple. As always, political government operates under gargantuan double standards, committing with impunity what it would imprison us for doing. The hypocrisy is so jaw-dropping you'd think that even public-school graduates would notice.

Meanwhile, Leviathan's "customers" not only buy under duress, they forego all the market's protections, too. Unhappy with your coverage under Obummercare? Too bad. No refunds — and not even so much as an apology. No switching to the insurer of your choice, either, unless bureaucrats approve of that particular company.

Contrast that with your usual experience in the private market, where most entrepreneurs work overtime to keep us happy. Their fate depends on pleasing us. If they don't, we switch to their competitor, and they go out of business.

I recently called a small business to correct my address on their mailing list; the woman answering the phone was not the one at fault, nor had the mistake caused a monumental problem for me — yet she apologized profusely. We've all exchanged clothing that doesn't fit, or perhaps your Aunt Ida's birthday present to you was as well-meaning but useless as her advice. Most returns are effortless; many online retailers even pay for shipping the item back to their warehouse. In a free market, entrepreneurs strive to please us because they cannot exist without clients.

But government can. It knows our patronage doesn't result from our satisfaction but from laws compelling us to use the State's "services." The bureaucrats running those programs lack any incentive to delight us. Their paychecks depend on our taxes, not on our gratification.

Tragically, the U.S. has never enjoyed a free market. From the beginning, governments have controlled the economy via licensing, chartering, regulations and, of course, taxes.

Those horrors have vastly increased over the last century. Today, Federal, state, and local governments subsidize or otherwise dominate a myriad industries, which then look to politicians, not customers, for their profits. For example, airlines receive a princely chunk of our taxes. That explains their insouciance toward the TSA's abuse of their customers as well as their survival despite passengers' supreme disgust at shoddy service. The less a business cares about catering to you, the more of your taxes it's gobbling.

Even worse than our dismay with the State's services is the blow to liberty. And the terms that describe this economic arrangement aren't good: we call it "fascism," "communism" or "socialism," depending on the degree of governmental oversight. When the State outright manages or owns the "means of production" (such as in constructing and maintaining roads), it's "communism." And when it runs those means "in partnership" with business — akin to an alliance with King Kong, given the imbalance of power — it's "fascism." "Socialism" varies from communism and fascism in a few technical details. But essentially, all three worship government as a god, ceding politicians and bureaucrats unlimited power.

Communism and fascism have murdered millions and impoverished billions everywhere they've prevailed. Their perverse incentives and central planning reduce production so severely that people starve, as is happening in Venezuela. Hunger killed millions in Europe during the Second World War, too, as proponents of these two variations on totalitarianism battled for supremacy. Worse than the material want is the poverty of the human soul under such dictatorship. When a government is strong enough to control supplies of food, it is strong enough to control every aspect of life.

Meanwhile, the notion that government can produce something people value enough to buy, or that it can "partner" with entrepreneurs who do, is as silly as Hillary Clinton's excuses for losing the election. Our interactions in the market, whether buying or selling, are voluntary. But government is force — physical, brutal, lethal force. It may glorify itself with museums and marble monuments while prattling about patriotism, but its essence is raw, physical compulsion. If you don't obey politicians and bureaucrats, if you ignore their diktats, they will arrest you. If you resist that arrest, and continue resisting, they'll increase the volume of force until they ultimately kill you. Behind every law and regulation, no matter how innocuous or beneficial they may seem, lies the same potentially lethal force.

Force always overwhelms free will. We do not voluntarily participate in the market with guns pointed at us: we aren't buying Obummercare because we want insurance but because the government constrains us to.

Which makes us slaves, the antithesis of customers.

— Becky Akers