What does the slide down statism’s slippery slope look like? Let’s take a tour of the future. Those questioning the vision presented are invited to refer to the entire history of mankind to verify it.

For any society, large or small, to survive, it must produce enough goods and services to support itself. To grow, surpluses must be generated, saved, and invested in future production. There are two overlapping groups of people: those who produce and those who receive what is produced. Historically, the greater the overlap the more successful the society. The more producers are allowed to keep, the more they produce.

The overlaps shrinks when the government takes by force from those who produce, which every government eventually does. The United States government has had the legal right to do so since passage of the income tax amendment in 1913. Since that year the Federal Reserve Act has also given it the right to set the value of the unit of exchange. Depreciation of the currency is just another way government takes from producers.

Once producers lose the right to their production, economic growth slows. (The Industrial Revolution marks the apex of American economic growth.) The productive class shrinks, the recipient class expands. Governments, based on coercion, produce nothing, and even if they could, are incapable of responding to changing private demands. Since force rather than productive ability becomes the arbiter of who gets what, power accretes to the government while the power of individuals shrink. What starts out as a slow, almost imperceptible shift accelerates over time.

To varying degrees, the preceding paragraph describes every country on the planet over the last one hundred years. Countries in which the process is more advanced offer insight for our tour of the future. Where is the U.S. right now? At a point of inflection hereby christened the Chiquita point, when a republic goes full banana. The state has its fingers in most every pie, rewarding its friends and punishing its enemies. There is no disguising deteriorating economic performance, although the state and its sycophantic media churn out propaganda to the contrary. The government relies on steadily increasing taxation, currency depreciation, and debt to fund itself, and criminalizes capital flight.

Civil liberties are a dead letter, first for opponents of the regime, then for everyone else. Prominent critics are persecuted. Some disappear or die under mysterious circumstances, cowing the rest of the population. The state security apparatus grows in size, power, intrusiveness, and ability to inflict terror. An elite lives in sumptuous splendor while corruption, hypocrisy, and cynicism stage upside breakouts. The nation’s wealth dwindles and most people face shrinking opportunities and impoverishment. The government nationalizes the most lucrative businesses amidst widespread shortages and mounting inflation. To survive, many turn to “black” markets (black because the government has criminalized honest production and exchange), the only sector of the economy that grows.

The arbitrary decrees of an aspiring despot replace the rule of law. Legislative and judicial branches become rubber stamps. The government buys the votes of the masses in increasingly fraudulent elections. Failure feeds failure: the more the government takes over and controls, the worse things get. As the situation deteriorates, dissatisfaction with the government increases and it becomes openly repressive. It may make war to rally and divert the citizenry, “cure” unemployment, and keep the always dangerous military (it has most of the guns) occupied. Beyond the Chiquita point lies naked totalitarianism, with its tyrannical lawlessness, random terror, destruction, and death. Ultimately the government collapses, undone by its own incompetence and evil, a failed economy, domestic insurrection, defeat in war, or some combination of the above.

New Deal, Socialist Paradise, Dictatorship of the Proletariat or some other catchy phrase has often been used to disguise an expansion of the state, the loss of individual freedom, and rule by naked force. The consequences for political systems based on violence are always the consequences of violence: destruction and death. A seminal Ayn Rand insight: those holding the guns are not unaware of those consequences; that is what they were after all along. Destruction and death are their goals, and since they are parasitically dependent on their victims, they will die when their host does. That conclusion runs violently counter to prevailing dogma, but what other can be drawn from the carnage of the last century?

How can such carnage be stopped, other than by waiting for statism’s inevitable failures? Ultimately it is a battle of diametrically opposed principles and must be fought on that plain. If first principles are surrendered, the battle is lost. All creatures are endowed with the means of their own survival. Humans must produce to survive. The very first principle must be that humans are free to use to their faculties and keep or dispose of what they produce as they choose—survival depends on liberty. That principle necessarily implies that no individual or individuals may initiate force against another individual or individuals. All humans have the right to respond to illegitimate force with force. The right of self-defense, like the right to produce, rests on the requirements of human survival. The legitimate initiation of force resides with the government, but only to protect the citizenry to which it is subordinated from external or internal force and fraud and enforce laws necessary to further that function.

Nothing is foreordained, but a choice must be made: liberty or chains. For most of history the choice has been chains. Mankind now has the capacity to destroy itself in less than a day. Liberty does not happen by accident. After the most destructive and deadly century in history, only a fully conscious decision to embrace liberty and reject the chains will prevent our hypothetical tour of the future from becoming reality.