Compliance = Enslavement Sweatshirt
We recommend many classics of Western literature on this website, although we admit tomes like Anarchy, State, and Utopia and Man, Economy, and State are hardly light reading. To fix that we’d like to recommend another must-read: If You Give a Mouse a Cookie, a 40-page-long picture book by Laura Joffe Numeroff.
Here’s the summary: A little boy gives a mouse a cookie. The mouse, ungrateful little **** that he is, next requests a glass of milk. And then a straw. And then a napkin. By the time the mouse’s list of orders has been fulfilled, he has required the little boy to read him bedtime stories, hand over all of his stationary, and act as his personal maid service.
Did Numeroff attempt to write a libertarian parable? Possibly. We would ask her ourselves, but we can’t risk the embarrassment of getting thrown out of yet another children's book signing. Regardless, a story can tell a moral its author didn’t intend.
Suppose that instead of giving a mouse a cookie, you forfeited some of your property, liberty or God-given rights to a big, reeking rat. What would the rat’s next move be? Only to demand even more of the same, until you have no choice but to devote your entire existence to satisfying the rat. Pleasing the rat. Obeying the rat. Congratulations! You are now a slave to the rat, and all it took was compliance with its relentless slew of demands. Plus the rat can legally kill you.
