If you have read the Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis, you know that the Devil is an expert in turning good impulses toward evil ends, and in leading people to misapply virtues in ways that serve the cause of evil.

Permit me to draw your attention to what strikes me as the most profound political paradox of our times. The US government is larger, more consolidated, more powerful, and more intrusive than it has ever been in its history—indeed our sweet land of liberty is now host to the most powerful leviathan state that has ever existed.

The logic of the market is predicated on the pervasive and glorious inequality of man. No two people have the same scales of values, talents, or ambitions. It is this radical inequality, and the freedom to choose our own lot in life, that makes possible the division of labor and exchange.

In a truly free society, it wouldn’t matter who the president was. We wouldn’t have to vote or pay attention to debates. We could ignore campaign commercials. There would be no high stakes for ourselves, our families, or the country. Liberty and property would be so secure that we could curse him, love him, or forget about him.

No totalitarian state has tolerated even a modicum of financial privacy. That follows from the premise that citizens should not be granted any privacy at all. After all, they might use it in opposition to the government’s plans, or support themselves apart from the government.

Clinton wants his private life back. His personal behavior is his business alone, and his family’s. It’s a moral outrage that a prosecutor wants to turn a private matter into a public one. Ken Starr’s power is wholly illegitimate.

Welcome to the early nineteenth century, when people actually did have private lives because the government dared not intrude. Family was autonomous and so too were extended families. Homes were sacred spaces. Businesses were private property. Neighborhoods managed their own affairs without outside intervention.

“There went out a decree from Caesar Augustus,” says St. Luke on why Mary and Joseph found themselves in Bethlehem, “that all the world should be taxed.” Joseph had to go to his own city because the tyrannical Roman government was conducting a census. But the information may have been used for more than just taxation. The Roman government’s local ruler later decided he wanted to find the Christ child and kill Him.

We already know political campaigns amount to serial fibathons. We know that there is no way to hold these guys to their promises. We know that once they get in charge of our lives and money, we will have less freedom after they are finished with us than before. We are trapped. We also know that democracy offers no way out of this trap, especially not the first-past-the-post kind of democracy that squeezes out all but two candidates who largely agree that the state they are pleading to manage should be all powerful.

Not for the first time in world history, US voters on November 2 faced a choice between two varieties of statism, two forms of central planning, two types of duplicity, two approaches to rule by the central state. One won, one lost.

“Plundering wealth may lead to more equality, but it’s an equality of poverty.”