Government Is Inherently Evil

         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.