Government is an organization built on systematic coercion. For that reason,
coercive government is by far the gravest possible threat to love and freedom.
It is inevitable that those who wish to use coercion against others strive to
capture government power and to increase that power. Government thus tends to
grow, at the expense of love and freedom, and to fall into the hands of people
who are especially interested in pushing others around by force.
That simple truth is the abolitionist argument in a nutshell.
- 4 -
Government justifies its license to use force by monopolizing national defense,
police, and court functions. These functions sometimes require force and exist,
at least in theory, to protect the rights and even the lives of citizens. They
are important functions, and giving a monopoly on those functions to a single
entity is a huge mistake.
Allowing this force-wielding, monopolistic entity to broaden its use of
coercion into other areas, including funding (taxation), is an even bigger
mistake. Once the principle is accepted that forcible government can involve
itself in other functions, all is lost, although the disaster may not come to
full flower for decades - and along the way, the masses will be told, and many
will believe, that the love-and-freedom-killing growth of government power is a
good thing - even a necessary thing. That is how every growing tyranny, from
Hitler's Germany to Castro's Cuba , presents itself to the citizen/victims, and
the ongoing growth of tyranny in the United States has followed the same
pattern.
- 5 -
In Social Statics (1851), Herbert Spencer pointed out just how deeply, horribly
wrong is the whole idea of running society by a system of force:
"Command is the growl of coercion crouching in ambush. Or we might aptly term
it - violence in a latent state. All its accessories - its frown, its voice,
its gestures, prove it akin to the ferocity of the uncivilized man. Command is
the foe of peace, for it breeds war of words and feelings - sometimes of deeds.
It is inconsistent with the first law of morality. It is radically wrong."
"Every man has freedom to do all that he wills, provided he infringes not the
equal freedom of any other man. Though further qualifications of the liberty of
action thus asserted may be necessary, yet we have seen (p. 89) that in the
just regulation of a community no further qualifications of it can be
recognised. Such further qualifications must ever remain for private and
individual application. We must therefore adopt this law of equal freedom in
its entirety, as the law on which a correct system of equity is to be based."
[Emphasis in original]
-- From Chapter 6 of Spencer's Social Statics: or, The Conditions essential to
Happiness specified, and the First of them Developed, as published at the
Online Library of Liberty.
How dangerous is the mistake of creating a monopolistic, coercive central
authority? In the just-past 20th Century, governments murdered over 260 million
people - more than two and a half million murders per year, for a hundred
years. This is in addition to many millions of war dead in the government wars
of that bloody century. It is in addition to tens of millions who were tortured
or maimed or raped or otherwise harmed, but not actually killed. It is in
addition to hundreds of millions kept in poverty and hunger unnecessarily. It
is in addition to the many millions who had mothers or fathers or other family
or friends murdered or maimed or tortured or raped or otherwise harmed. It is
in addition to massive environmental damage (e.g., pretty much the entire
Soviet Union, so polluted and otherwise hostile to life that those living in
its corpse have an average lifespan of only 66 years, 16 fewer than in Japan
and 14 fewer than in the European Union. For Russian men, the average lifespan
is an even more abysmal 58 years).
How much emotional damage was caused by all that mayhem and murder? There is no
way to quantify it, but clearly the emotional health and capacity for love of
millions was harmed, often dramatically, by the staggering levels of violence
and cruelty inflicted upon them by government, both directly (e.g., war and
genocide) and indirectly (for example, from corporatism).
Creating the formalized, systematic coercion of government was the most
dangerous and damaging mistake the human race has ever made.
- 6 -
Earlier in this nation's history - as late as the 1950s and early 1960s -
Americans had a generally warm view of government employees and even of
politicians, or at least of some politicians. There was great affection for
Eisenhower and for Kennedy, for example - not from everyone, to be sure, but
from a very great many people. Policemen, teachers, and many others within
government were seen as genuine protectors and benefactors - as fellow citizens
providing necessary services. Such government employees were, for the most
part, not seen as tyrants or bullies or agents of pro-tyranny propaganda. While
the positive perception of such government employees was far from universally
deserved, it was nonetheless based on a large measure of truth. Citizens had
more direct control over the less-centralized government of that time than they
do today, and the legal protections built into the Constitution and its Bill of
Rights were better known, more widely respected in Congress and elsewhere,
including by many on-the-ground government employees, and more reliably
enforced by the courts.
Returning to the wider understanding and enforcement of human rights in this
country would be a boon to government employees as well as to the rest of us;
why be feared or hated ("don't tase me, bro!") when you can be loved and
respected. Protecting love and freedom instead of violating those qualities is
what makes the difference.
As Thoreau pointed out in Civil Disobedience, "That government is best which
governs not at all." Until we reach that healthier state, let us strive to at
least undo the growth and the corruption of government power that has infected
the United States over the years, and return our beloved nation to the status
it once aspired to, and was partly worthy of: a sanctuary and asylum for
mankind.
http://www.strike-the-root.com/72/allport/allport19.html
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
