We Have Created A Monster

With every passing day, government intervention is moving closer to becoming a social norm. As each new soviet style czar is appointed to oversee more private industries, the land of the free and the home of the brave is becoming less recognizable.

Many people think of corporations and governments as if they are living beings. Somehow politicians and intellectual anti-capitalists, over time, have been able to convince the masses that corporations are evil and that the government is here to stop them from stealing from the poor, that market entrepreneurs are thieves and political entrepreneurs are noble. The truth is that governments, just like corporations, aren’t living things; they are made up of groups of ordinary people who are just as susceptible to corruption. They have buildings, in which they operate, but don’t actually exist independently of the people who run them.

This is why there is nothing that government can do that the private sector cannot, theoretically, do better. The only difference between the two is that there are many corporations but only one government. As a result, corporations have the natural barrier of competition, whereas politicians do not. People will combat this by saying things like “who would build the roads and bridges”? Actually, in the 19^th century, most roads, bridges, and canals were privately funded. This is where the word “turnpike” comes from, but this is a story for another day. The problem with this is that the government doesn’t actually have its own money or produce anything. It must take money, by force, from its citizens and then pay a private company to produce something for it. Even roads and bridges are built by private companies that are paid by the government. So I ask this: how does the government take $1.00 from a citizen, pay a government employee to do the paperwork on that dollar and then pay a whole dollar to a private company to produce something? In other words, how does that $1.00 still equal $1.00 after it is funneled through a government bureaucracy? The answer is that it doesn’t. Milton friedman, in his book capitalism and freedom, said this: Government is necessary to preserve our freedom; yet by concentrating power in political hands, it is also a threat to freedom. Even though the men who wield this power initially be of good will and even though they may be not corrupted by the power they exercise, the power will both attract and form men of a different stamp. So even if you believe a politician to have good intentions, the man who takes his place may not.

Economic Freedom

No matter what selling point the government uses to take your money, Whether it be “cleaner energy,” “free healthcare,” “Infrastructure,” “job creation,” etc., the story never changes. When all of that is stripped away, the concept gets very simple. When you voluntarily allow the government to take away your money, you are surrendering your economic freedom. Another way to put it would be: if the government taxes you 10% more, they are taking away 10% more of your economic freedom. Most people are ok with this but here lies the problem. There is no freedom without economic freedom, because money is the currency for which labor, food, clothing and commodities are exchanged. This is why economic freedom can exist without political freedom but political freedom can never exist without economic freedom.

Government is here to protect our freedom, not to take it away. Its purpose is to set the rules, with the consent of it’s people and to enforce them, not to organize society for us. Ronald Reagan, in his inaugural speech, said this: We are a nation that has a government -- not the other way around. And this makes us special among the nations of the earth. Our Government has no power except that granted it by the people. It is time to check and reverse the growth of government which shows signs of having grown beyond the consent of the governed.

More government=less freedom; less government=more freedom. It sounds pretty simple to me and our government is growing by the day; let’s use our democratic power to stop it.