Category: Government

Government Is Inherently Evil

George Noga
Less than 2% of all human beings who ever have lived experienced liberty.
Government Is Inherently Evil
By: George Noga – January 19, 2020

         Periodically I remind readers and myself why my lodestar is more liberty and less government. Readers question why I call government evil; after all, isn’t it necessary? Yes, some limited government is needed but only because it is better than anarchy. Both anarchy and government are evil but government is the lesser evil. Governments may not set out to do evil. Mao, Stalin, Hitler and Castro may have believed they were seeking a greater good, but to make an omelet they had to break some eggs.

      From your neighborhood HOA up to the UN, government is evil because power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. That is why less than 2 billion of the  115 billion humans who have inhabited Earth lived their lives in relative liberty; the other 113 billion suffered unspeakable government propagated evil. That also is why George Washington returning his commission after the Revolution and relinquishing power after two terms as president made him the greatest man of his age.

       America’s founders well understood that the challenge is to give government a monopoly on the legally sanctioned use of force necessary to create order and to protect citizens, while simultaneously limiting that power through a constitution, federalism, separation of powers and checks and balances. Is the government of the United States evil? In the following section I catalog my experiences with government. After reading that, readers may decide that question for themselves.

  •  I had no father at home during WWII and Korea, both of which resulted from  government appeasement, ineptitude and failure to heed and to act on existential threats. We were lucky; hundreds of thousands of Americans never returned.
  •   For twelve years I was forced to attend wretched government schools where teachers had delusions of adequacy and sports were valued over learning.
  •   I was subjected to a mind-numbing array of taxes including income tax of 94%.
  •  Throughout my lifetime and continuing to the present, government has unleashed numerous economic cycles, bubbles, busts, panics, meltdowns and disasters.
  •   It now requires $25,000 to buy what $1,000 bought when I was born, due solely to government debasement; this is a cumulative 2,500% rate of inflation.
  •   The government-promulgated disaster that was the Vietnam War discombobulated my life for many years and required me to serve in the military.
  •   I owned a government-regulated business for 35 years. The regulations were a Kafkaesque wasteland and actually harmed consumers in the guise of protecting them.
  •   Government promoted certain foods (food pyramid) as healthy and advised us about a healthy diet. Instead, what they told us to eat was harmful and could kill us.
  •   A lifetime of hard work and thrift has been diminished by chronic negative real interest rates solely to protect our feckless government from the consequences of its ongoing binge of spending, debt and deficits. It is just a matter of time until our debt reaches critical mass – subjecting us and our children to a lost generation.
  •   The just-enacted Secure Act reneges on the decades-old government promise of stretch IRAs and destroys many years of careful estate planning.
  •   I narrowly escaped the Obamacare death panels, but still could have my life shortened via rationing and death panels under a single-payer government system.

       There is more – much more – but you get the drift. All the Clockwork Orange execrable horrors I experienced during my lifetime were not imposed by some third world tyrant but by a government most consider among the best in the world – even among the best of all time. Imagine living under a truly “bad” government.

        My lifetime of Orwellian lunacies did not result from a failure of government, but simply from government being government. The evil in government is inherent and it cannot be controlled or diminished. It gloms onto the ephemeral while ignoring the existential; it appeals to people’s prejudices, passions, jealousies, apprehensions and emotions. Yet there are many among us who crave ever more government.

       History teaches us we cannot control government; we only can limit it. The answer therefore lies not in more government or even in better government (an oxymoron) but in more liberty and less  government! And that is why I write this blog.

Our next post on January 26th marks the 52nd anniversary of the Tet Offensive. 
More Liberty Less Government  –  mllg@mllg.us  –  www.mllg.us

The Origin of Government

George Noga
Economic means must precede political means; production must precede
consumption; how prehistoric economies led to the origin of government.
 By: George Noga – February 21, 2016

    Economic means must precede political means. That axiom by Tom Palmer explains why there are no governments among primitive societies. They have leaders but never a state. Hunter-gatherers and nomads don’t generate enough of an economic surplus to support a permanent predator class. Nonetheless, such societies were victimized by roving bandits (precursors of government) who moved on once they plundered what little was available. There was no reason for them to stay. Also nomads and hunters were not stationary and hence not easy targets for predators.

    Everything changed once people settled permanently and established agriculture. Now they generated a regular economic surplus and were vulnerable because they had to remain in one location. Once again, roving bandits came, pillaged and plundered. However, the bandits were not stupid; they grasped the opportunity. Now there was a reason for them to stay and to plunder permanently. Hence, roving bandits morphed into stationary bandits who, through sheer force, subjugated the people and kept out other roving bandits. They thereby acquired and enforced a monopoly on physical violence within a given territory and, voila, government was created.

    The etiology is clear enough. An economic surplus is an a priori condition for the existence of a state. Government cannot exist without entrepreneurs; they have to build it before government can plunder it. Without those who invest, take risks and build businesses, government could not exist. Even the earliest farmers had to invest (plant seeds, tend crops) and take risks (drought, pestilence) while the now-permanent bandits did nothing constructive and often imposed obstacles to hinder productivity.

    Things are no different today. Permanent bandits, who now sanctimoniously go by titles such as kings, emperors, presidents and prime ministers, plunder through their enforced monopoly on violence. America is little different simply because our rulers govern with the pro forma consent of the governed. They call themselves mayor, governor, congressman or president but they behave like the bandits of yore. They plunder from the rest of us to enrich themselves in many ways – licit and illicit.

    Some like Barack Obama (“You didn’t build that”) and Hillary Clinton (“Businesses don’t create jobs“) have the sheer chutzpah to claim government is the source of economic success. Even barbarians of prehistoric times clad in animal skins would have found that absurd; lacking economic knowledge, they nevertheless understood that plunderers did not help the plundered create their businesses. They also viscerally understood Say’s Law that production must always precede consumption, i.e. there was nothing to be plundered until someone produced something.

    We might even be better off today with the bandits of ancient times. Sometimes they got sated and left us alone. Some grasped that plundering less today caused the economy to grow faster so they could plunder more tomorrow, thus benefiting both plunderers and plunderees. Bandits understood imposing arbitrary rules, regulations and creating uncertainty was counterproductive to the amount of plunder. Our current crop of stationary bandits never gets sated and is less enlightened than its ancient barbarian predecessors who stormed down from the steppes of Central Asia.

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The next post describes America’s first encounter with Islamic terrorism – 230 years ago.
Do you know what it was?

Why Government is Inherently Evil

George Noga
By: George Noga – May 24, 2014
       James Madison in Federalist 51 famously wrote: “In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.”  More recently Milton Friedman put it thusly: “How can we keep the government we created (primarily to protect our freedom) from becoming a Frankenstein that will destroy the very freedom we established it to protect?” Very few realize how rare, delicate and fragile are liberty and freedom in the entire history of human experience. Of the estimated 110 billion humans who have ever lived, fewer than 1% have enjoyed liberty.
“Over 99% of humanity has lived only in tyranny and repression.”
       The first step in protecting liberty is awareness of just how venal are all forms of power even the lowest. Let’s begin by looking at fraternities, homeowners associations and country clubs. In my college fraternity, elections for officers were corrupted; once elected few voluntarily relinquished power; elections for fraternity sweetheart were fixed; and those in power stole money – all this from a group of brothers.
       Homeowners associations are a microcosm of government. Generally, the wrong people run for office and, once elected, abuse their power and transmogrify into power-hungry wannabe dictators. Even a small group of neighbors in the same socio-economic group cannot govern collegially. I once belonged to a club that had a committee for selecting the wines to be served in its restaurants. The committee became as permanent as the Soviet Politburo; new members were precluded from joining; and they instituted frequent parties for themselves to taste new wines. They, of course, needed food to go along with the wine tasting and they expected all this extravagance to be paid by the club. Bottom line: all power corrupts; it is endemic in all organizations beginning with the most basic. It is endemic because it is an inextricable and immutable part of the human condition.
“A government’s maleficence increases exponentially with its size and power.”
       The bigger a government, the more corrupt. Local governments in my area have raised corruption to an art form. They find myriad ways to benefit from the public weal, albeit likely without technically violating the law. The schools are abysmal and dominated by (also corrupt) public employee unions. My state government is incapable of fixing a long running property insurance fiasco that threatens to bankrupt it. Our federal government (Amtrak) sells hamburgers for $9.50 to a captive audience and incredibly loses $6.50 each. Not to worry: they will make it up in volume. As to be expected, international organizations are the worst. The UN engages in child rape in Africa and the Nobel Committee admittedly awarded peace prizes solely for vindictiveness to punish Reagan and Bush.
Four Keys to Better Government

        Some level of government has proven to be necessary to protect us from outside threats, domestic violence and to enforce contracts and property rights. We face the same dilemma as Madison and Friedman: how do we cede government a legal monoply on the use of force while simultaneously controlling it and making sure it protects (rather than destroys) our liberty?  Following are universal truths constant throughout time and space and applicable to all governments:

  1. The first step is understanding and internalizing the truth that power corrupts. Understand that government is inherently evil and requires eternal vigilance to keep it inside its constitutional box.
  2. Because the evil in government is inherent (embedded in human nature), it can’t be eliminated or reformed. Part of the evil manifests itself in widespread waste, fraud and abuse – which also never can be exterminated.
  3. Government maleficence cannot be eliminated, but it can be reduced. The only way is to shrink government, ipso facto creating less evil along with less of its miscegenistic stepchildren: waste, fraud and abuse.
  4. The only way to make government smaller is to take away its money; the less money it has, the less harm it can perpetrate. Nothing else will ever work.
       Upon accepting the Nobel Prize in economics, Friedrich Hayek said: “To act on the belief that we possess the knowledge and the power to shape the processes of society to our liking is likely to make us do much harm. . . The recognition of the insuperable limits of (man’s) knowledge ought indeed teach the student of society a lesson of humility which should guard him against becoming an accomplice in men’s fatal striving to control society – a striving which makes him not only a tyrant over his fellows, but which may well make him the destroyer of a civilization. “

ObamaCare’s April Fool – Only It’s No Joke

George Noga
By: George Noga – April 1, 2014
        You believe you know all the ObamaCare horror stories? You know the lies about keeping your doctor and health plan; you know about the millions of cancelled plans and  the illegal extensions. You know about the website disaster and the much higher premiums, deductibles and copays. You know about all the political payoffs to labor unions and about the 29ers and 49ers.. You know high-end medical facilities such as Mayo are now off limits. You know you have much fewer choices of physicians and hospitals. You know about the coming doctor shortage, rationing and death panels.
        If you know all that, you still don’t know the biggest April Fool of them all; in fact, you don’t know either of the two biggest ObamaCare surprises. In the run up to the law we incessantly heard about the 40+ million uninsured and how disgraceful this was for Amrica. Obama said: “I’m not going to walk away from 40 million Americans who can get health insurance for the first time.” ObamaCare was sold primarily so that the uninsured could get coverage. The dirty secret is ObamaCare never was about providing coverage to the uninsured; instead, it was about changing Americans’ private insurance plans into government plans.
“ObamaCare’s goal was not to insure the uninsured but to shift Americans from owning private insurance plans into becoming dependent on government plans.”
       The numbers bear this out. Pre ObamaCare, the 48 million uninsured number always was a known red herring. From 10-15 million already were eligible for public plans; 9-12 million were illegal aliens; 17-29 million earned enough to buy insurance but freely chose not to; and 4 million were without insurance only temporarily. Bottom line: when using reasonable midpoint estimates for the above data, only 5 to 10 million Americans were involuntarily without health insurance. Now, let’s fast forward to 2014 and ObamaCare and see what has changed.
  • Only about 10% who bought through exchanges were previously uninsured.
  • Up to 80% who signed up with exchanges shifted from private plans to public subsidies.
  • 60% of those who signed up for Medicaid were already eligible.
  • Illegal aliens remain ineligible for ObamaCare just as before its passage.
  • The 17-29 million Americans (mostly young males) who previously chose not to buy insurance are less likely to buy now that they are required to subsidize everyone else.
        When all the data become known, we still will have 40 million uninsured Americans – about the same number as before ObamaCare. This is not an accident and was well understood beforehand. ObamaCare never was about insuring the uninsured, it was about shifting private insurance to government programs. There you have it; you once again have been hoodwinked and bamboozled. This April Fool is no joke and it is on you. Where are all my liberal friends who were bleating about helping the poor and uninsured? When the piper plays; they dance.
“ObamaCare is dividing Americans into 3 distinct cohorts. One-third will be dependent on Medicaid (ugh!); the middle cohort will have fewer and much less desirable choices; the top group will enjoy top-tier concierge services.”
        I wrote supra there is a second surprise, i.e. ObamaCare is carving up Americans into three distinct segments each of which will receive widely different care. The bottom third will be on Medicaid and dependent on government programs with little choice of doctor or hospital; they will receive substandard and indifferent care. The middle cohort of Americans will muddle through with costly plans that exclude the best physicians, hospitals and facilities; they will experience lengthy waits and rationing. Surprise: the top 10% to 20% of Americans will receive concierge medical care and continue to have the best of everything America offers.
     ObamaCare is a naked lie. It was sold to us as compassionate to insure more Americans; it doesn’t accomplish that because there weren’t but 5-10 million involuntarily uninsured Americans to begin with. Instead, its goal is to move everyone into government care and in the process it cruelly divides us into three groups – each with vastly different standards of  care.

How Government Destroyed the American Dream

George Noga

By: George Noga – Updated March 1, 2014

    In 1957 my parents paid $10,900 for a new median-price home. Their monthly payment including principal, interest, taxes and insurance was under $100. The house cost 1.5 years of my father’s income and the annual cost of ownership consumed less than 15% of income. We lived quite well without my mother ever working a single day.

     I graduated from high school in 1961 and went on to college. Most high school chums remained in Orlando, began work at entry-level positions, married, had children and bought homes. The wives stayed home as a second income was not necessary to own a home or to raise children. I kept in touch with many erstwhile high school classmates and often visited them in their homes. Following is the story of two such people, Steve and Sandy.  

The True Story of Steve and Sandy

    Steve and Sandy (their real names) were high school sweethearts who married following graduation. Steve was hired in the paint shop of the Martin Company. His starting wage of $2.00/hour soon was  increased to $2.25; including a little overtime, their family income was $5,000 per year. Less than a year after their marriage, they bought a new home; soon thereafter they had a daughter. Sandy did not work and stayed home to care for the baby.

    I visited Steve and Sandy frequently during summers. They bought and furnished a new median-price single family home in Orlando. They were able to accumulate the down payment and to furnish the home in less than one year with both working. Once Sandy became pregnant, she quit work as they were able to afford the cost of home ownership solely on Steve’s income. Their home cost two years of Steve’s income; their monthly house payment including principal, interest, taxes and insurance was under $100. They comfortably managed the cost of home and baby and never contemplated Sandy going back to work as it simply wasn’t necessary.

    Let’s fast forward 50 years to 2012 and to Steve and Sandy’s grandchild, Steve III. After high school Steve III earns at best $12/hour, or $24,000 per year. The median home costs 10 times his income and accumulating even a low 10% down payment would be daunting requiring years of saving. Even at low interest rates, the monthly nut would be $1,500, or $18,000 annually – nearly equal to Steve III’s take home pay. What possibly could account for such a dramatic change in only two generations? The answer in one word: government.

    The American dream is dead, thanks entirely to government that sucks the blood out of its citizens, i.e. the vampire state. For the first time ever, Americans believe the next generation will be worse off. In 1962 single-income families like Steve and Sandy were the norm; it was rare indeed for a married woman, especially one with children, to work outside the home.

  Within one generation (by 1985) two-income families became a majority. Now Steve and Sandy’s son, Steve Jr., was 50% likely to have his wife in the work force. Today, during the generation of Steve III, wives and mothers must work to keep the family afloat. How and why did these changes happen? Why is it necessary today for a family to have two wage earners merely to live as well as their grandparents once lived with only one wage-earner?

“Two-income families are a Faustian bargain; the second income

pays only for more government, i.e. more blood for the vampire.”

     The causes are many but all have a nexus to government. Fiat money and the abolition of the gold standard debased the dollar and devalued thrift and savings. Payroll and income taxes mushroomed and applied to ever more income. Property taxes rose exponentially. Regulation chokes growth and hidden taxes proliferate. Housing costs skyrocketed due to government growth management diktats such as concurrency, greenbelts, zoning, bureaucracy, regulatory delay, infill and anti leap-frogging to name only some of the culprits. The vampire state sucked out ever increasing amounts of blood – but it never is sated.

   We were hoodwinked and seduced; for a brief time ersatz prosperity seemed to follow the transition to two-income households. Yes, we could have a second car (albeit a necessity not a luxury for two wage earners) and an extra TV and a few other accoutrements. By the time people noticed the degradation in their quality of life, it was too late for a volte-face. Two-worker families are a Faustian bargain; the second salary pays only for more blood for the vampire. Families doubled the number of workers and received only fool’s gold in return. Are Steve and Sandy’s grandchildren really better off today than their grandparents?