Searching for a Parable

For the past few days I've been distracted with chasing down a parable that I heard many years ago.  I recall that it was written by one of the classic Anarchist theoreticians, and for a long time I thought that was Max Stirner -- it sounded like his kind of wacky humor -- but I haven't been able to find it under his name.  Possibly I've got the title wrong, but what I recall was "The Parable of the Highwayman".  If anybody can help me hunt it down, I'll be grateful.

The tale, as best I remember, goes like this;  the excuse govts. give for themselves is that they protect us from robbers of various sorts -- "enemies foreign and domestic", as US law puts it.  In exchange, the govt. asks for...  well, everything that govts. ask for. 

So how much much worse can the robbers be?

Consider the "Highwayman", says the parable.  He attacks you on the road, he takes your money, and then, having gotten what he wants, he goes away.  He does not accompany you on down the road, telling you how important he is and how lucky you are to have him with you.  He does not tell you how to conduct your life to the smallest detail.  He does not keep on robbing you at regular intervals.  He goes away. 

In this way, the Highwayman is more endurable than the govt. 

Well, the author of the parable didn't take into account modern slave-dealers or drug-cartels, but for the most part his parable still holds up.  He could also have added persistent deceit, and poorly enough to be insulting. 

For example of the latter, I give you Senator Cory Booker --  yet another reason that my childhood state of New Jersey is a good place to be from.  He's not content with pandering to the Black vote by pushing the old idiocy about Reparations For Slavery, which has made even other Black Democrats call him out for patronizing and insulting the voters.  No, he's also jumped on the anti-gun bandwagon with shameless exploitation of victims and flat-out lying, disguised under some weasel-wording so thin that it insults the people he's trying to fool.  At a "presidential(!) town hall" in North Carolina a few days ago, he brought in a weepy self-described stay-at-home mother who felt "traumatized" by learning that her daughter was taught an "active shooter drill" in kindergarten, and asked Booker the perfect set-up question of what he intended to do about "all this gun-violence".  He neatly avoided giving any real concrete solutions, but complained mightily that in the US we have "in the aggregate, a mass shooting every day". 

Now think about that.  "In the aggregate": what country is "TheAggregate"?  I've never heard of it.  Have you?  It sounds like a good place to stay away from.  In the United States, on the other hand (FBI stats), we do not have a mass shooting every day, or every week, or every month, or even every year -- not unless you define "mass shooting" as a single incident in which at least two people are shot": not killed, just shot.  The FBI defines it a little differently: as a single incident in which at least four people are shot dead.  Now an average of 30,000 Americans die every year of gunshots -- but a little over 20,000 of those deaths are suicides, another 1100 are "justifiable homicides" (i.e., crooks shot in the act by police or armed citizens), and about 500 are accidents.  That leaves about 8400 real gun-murders per year.  Now the figures fluctuate considerably from year to year, but generally about 3/4ths of all those real murders are singletons: that's about 6300 per year, which leaves the other 2100 as real honest-to-whatever "mass shootings" -- depending on the math.  Divide 2100 by 365, and you get... a little over 5 per day.  (Your mathematics may vary;  I'm terrible with arithmetic.)  But at least now we're getting close to what the FBI defines as a "mass shooting".  Considering that the majority of FBI-defined mass shootings are gang-fights in just 8 of our largest cities, and those gang-fights usually involve more than 5 participants, I think we can compress the numbers a little further.

At least now we can guess where Booker got his "aggregate" from -- and it's a cheat.  Fool me once, shame on you;  fool me twice, shame on me -- but try to fool me with insultingly stupid cheats, and you deserve to be met in a deserted ally with an old traditional Newark, New Jersey tool: a half-brick in the toe of a sturdy tube-sock.  Guess.

In any case, the average highwayman -- or street-thug -- would be better to deal with than a politician like this.  He makes Trump look downright honorable by comparison, and that takes some doing. 

--Leslie <;)))><