The Little Green Man is Back with More Questions

There’s a sequel to the brilliant “Government Explained” video, the one in which a human attempts to explain and justify the state to a visiting alien with a delightful British accent. The latest video is subtitled “The Special Piece of Paper,” and not only shreds the concept of a constitution limiting government (pun very much intended), but also refutes a number of other fallacies.

This segment essentially sums up the alien’s problems with the constitution, and lays bare the true nature of the state:

A long time ago a small bunch of regular humans had a meeting, and created a document called a constitution, that said that they can rob everyone else […] using threats of violence to make everyone obey their rules and commands. But so that the masses of the people would let them get away with this robbery and slavery, that small bunch also promised, in the same document, that were some things the government would never do, and they described a way to structure government so as to restrain it. But, over time the promises have proven to be worthless, the restraints have proven to be useless, and government has grown significantly in size, power, and scope, violating more and more of the rights of the people. It sounds to me as if the constitution was written to restrain government, then it’s been a complete failure.

Here’s the video, enjoy.

At around 8:20, the human explains that the only effective way to restrain government is through “an informed populace,” totally contradicting his earlier arguments that the constitution restrains the government. The alien points to this contradiction and shows how the two cannot be true at once.

Another direction the writer could have gone would be to have the alien ask: “Who is in charge of informing and educating the people?” The human would then respond, “Government, the government runs most of the schools and regulates virtually all of the rest.” The conversation would then have naturally gone into the inherent problem of the government educating a populace for the purpose of the people restraining government, and how this is ludicrous in theory; not to mention the century and a half of empirical evidence corroborating this conflict of interest.