Some of us, though, still have the fire.

But i don’t think you can sabotage every government action (e.g., how was Mike supposed to react?), so you’re left with a boycott.

There is no oversight at my job. I get my assignments from a computer; I have no adult supervision in the classroom. I’ve been doing and saying whatever I want in front of a classroom for two years now, encouraging six classes of high school students to question the system that brought them under my authority.

I’ve also worked in the private sector for many years (teaching is not my only job) and I am still nowhere near collecting more money from my pay than I estimate the state has taken from me through its many and varied means of expropriation. To me, marking my timesheets without providing the benefits the state expects from employing me is my way of repatriating my own stolen property. And if I do cross that line from net loss to net gain, well, so what? Every penny the state puts in my pocket is a penny not spent on tasers, tear gas, etc. By soaking up as much of the state’s wealth as possible we can accelerate its decline.

When I started teaching, I was afraid to work for the state, not just because I dreaded the idea that my actions might do something to support it, but because I thought working in such an environment might corrupt me into a rent-seeking bureaucrat like most of the public employees I’ve had the displeasure of encountering. However, paradoxically, the state’s incredible inefficiency gives me, as far as I can tell, perfect freedom to behave however I wish at work. If anyone was watching me I would have been fired long ago. For a while, when I started, I was just waiting for the axe to drop, but if it hasn’t by now I don’t know what I could do to bring it down upon me.

I’ve also got a master’s degree in economics from a heavily subsidized state college and I’m currently taking more subsidized classes at Berkeley in preparation for a PhD program. If all goes well, I will be a tenured economics professor paid by the state to advance…anti-statism. If educators will be the swords that slay the beast, the beast is doing a fine job of forging them.

Like how Marx said capitalism contains the seeds of its own destruction, statism is sowing its own crop. And it feels good to be one of those seeds. I think it’s something more of us should embrace.

I see your point, but when I wrote “work within the state” I meant “do work for the state in exchange for compensation”.

Making the beast fall on its own sword is a powerful idea, but I don’t really see it happening. States tend to expand and claim more power for themselves when they are injured except via war, coup or successful revolution. If we’re going to rule those methods out, it seems to me that the only real weapon we have left is education, with the goal in mind of convincing people, one at a time, to withdraw their internalized support for the state and to begin seeking non-state solutions to those legitimate social and economic problems to which states address themselves.