Writing for the American Institute for Economic Research (AIER — and I strongly recommend visiting their website daily for sharp writing and analysis), economist Joakim Book expresses here his disgust with governments.
He writes:
I don’t like how they are set up, how they’re ruled, how their existence furthers a one-size-fits-all approach to complicated social problems, or how they distort markets and behavior when they grab a share of every productive economic activity that they can spot. I don’t like how they’re the antithesis of liberty, and I particularly don’t like how their services – almost always and everywhere – are subpar.
It would be one thing if governments took 50%, 60%, or 75% of the value you created but gave you such excellent services in return that you felt like you got your money’s worth.
Instead, we get a hodgepodge of regulatory failures, bank bailouts, dead kids in the Middle East, and a runaway national debt, while politicians live grand lives at the expense of the subjects they pretend to represent. Emergency by fake emergency, they grow in size, inching the battle lines of respectable power wielding a little further each time.
Yes, but that’s putting it mildly.
As sociologist Franz Oppenheimer argued in his book The State, governments are rooted in conquest and survive because they succeed in organizing and systematizing the plunder of subject peoples — taxation. They employ all manner of devices to frighten or hoodwink people into cooperation. Every now and then, some people get fed up and revolt to throw off the oppressive yoke of the government. We Americans managed to do so, with our efforts at creating a new government that would protect people’s liberty but otherwise leave them alone. That worked for a while, but the political predators wormed their way in.
Book shows that it doesn’t seem possible to keep governments limited to just a few useful functions, making it seem like more than idle speculation to wonder why they exist in the first place.