|
|
|
|
Why Do We Need Government?
 About
twenty years ago a very intelligent man,
whom I’ll call Robert (he’s actually a sort of composite of several
men),  told
me he was an anarchist. He didn’t believe in any government, period.
At the time I considered myself a
conservative, with libertarian leanings. Much as I respected Robert, I believed
in limited government under the U.S. Constitution — but none at all?
That was taking a good idea too far, I thought.
Notice the illogic of my reaction. I
was thinking of a philosophy as a matter of personal taste, as if you could
draw an arbitrary line and stop there. “Would you prefer a little bit of
government, a moderate amount, or a lot of it?”
After a while (years, actually) it
sank in that Robert wasn’t just telling me what quantity
of government he’d prefer. He was saying that the whole idea of it
was wrong in principle — no matter whether it was democratic,
Communist, monarchist, Christian, or something else. He would agree that
some are worse than others, but he insisted that all were wrong. Any
government is a monopoly of organized force, inherently unjustifiable; and
once accepted, it’s bound to get out of control sooner or later.
This notion is hard for Americans
to grasp, let alone assent to. After all, we have what looks like a solid
rationale for government in our Declaration of Independence, plus a practical
plan for keeping it within due limits in our Constitution and Bill of Rights.
True, American government has become a staggering tangle of laws, powers,
regulations, and taxes, with recurrent wars, public debt, debased money, and
countless other evils, but couldn’t this be cured by returning to the
Constitution?
That’s what I used to think.
Besides, what would we replace the government with? Who would protect us
from violent crime and foreign enemies? Who would coin the money? Who
would pave the streets and fix the potholes? Others would ask who would
feed the destitute, care for the sick and elderly, protect minorities, and
cope with myriad other crises, emergencies, and easily imaginable disasters
— most of which, by the way, didn’t use to be thought of as
responsibilities of government. Everyone has a horrible fantasy that makes
the actual horror seem (to him) worth putting up with.
![[Breaker quote for Why Do We Need Government?: Or do we?]](2006breakers/060502.gif) Read
the label on a can of soup, and think how many laws and
regulations the vendor has to comply with. The rationale for these is that
the public has to be protected — from what? Unhealthy ingredients of
some sort, I suppose. But would we really be in any peril if there were no
government enforcing these costly restrictions? Would it be in the
seller’s interest to poison his customers, even if there were no legal
penalty for doing so? How often did that happen before all these laws were
imposed? Roadside fruit stands are still unregulated. Are these dangers to
the purchaser?
The other day I was ticketed, and
my car briefly impounded, when a policeman noticed that I was driving with a
cracked windshield. My car had passed the required safety inspection and had
the required sticker before some vandal had thrown rocks at it, so I thought
I was legal. I wasn’t hurting or threatening anyone; I posed no danger I
could see. The cop was as polite as a man with a pistol can be, but as he
ordered the car towed away I asked him quietly, “Just who are you
protecting from me?” The answer was a vague mumble about
“the public.”
Later I joked to friends that
I’d been “carjacked.” An armed man had seized my car, I
explained. Of course he had a badge, a uniform, and some sort of
“law” on his side, so I, not he, was the criminal. Heaven help me
if I’d tried to defend my property. Self-defense would have been an
even more serious offense. By submitting to force, I confined the evil to a
mere nuisance. This time.
Carjacking or
impoundment? We now have two vocabularies for wrongs, depending
on whether private persons or government agents commit them. This is the
difference between mass murderand national defense.
Between extortion and taxation. Between
counterfeiting and inflation. And so on. Other examples will
occur to the astute reader.
Do you smell a fault? No wonder
Frédéric Bastiat described government as “organized
plunder.”
Yet for most of my life, I believed
that social order depended on government. That is, I believed that freedom
depended on force, and ultimately that a great good depended on a great evil.
I’m afraid most people believe such things, and accept armed men in
uniforms as their benefactors.
Joseph Sobran |
||
| Copyright © 2006 by the
Griffin Internet Syndicate, a division of Griffin Communications This column may not be reprinted in print or Internet publications without express permission of Griffin Internet Syndicate 
|
||
|
||
|
Archive Table of Contents
Current Column Return to the SOBRAN’S home page. |
||
|
|
| FGF E-Package columns by Joe Sobran, Sam Francis, Paul Gottfried, and others are available in a special e-mail subscription provided by the Fitzgerald Griffin Foundation. Click here for more information. |