Our Enemy, The State

I haven't read Our Enemy, The State yet, but I'm looking forward to it. But this essay struck a cord with something I was puzzling over today and often puzzle over. I agree with Nock that there is no such thing as an anarchist Utopia, it's as much a fantasy as a communist Utopia, and the best we can achieve for ourselves is a severely limited government.

"The state being what it is, it matters little who holds office and wields its inordinate powers. This truth is dawning on some persons today; but the general public, however disillusioned with politicians, still has faith in politics as the means of curing all the ills of society and improving the quality of life. Hopefully, people will someday realize that what counts is the overextension of state power, not who holds public office. The important thing is to refute statist ideas, whatever their guise, and Nock's book is a big gun in our arsenal."

As I was walking the dog today, I contemplated why people have faith in government. Every American knows the old joke, "How do you tell when a politicians is lying? His lips are moving." It's funny because it's true. In one way, professional politicians are like every other human being - they're working in their own interests and the interests of their family. They're trying to advance their careers like every other human being. They're trying to make a better living for themselves and their families: to get a bigger house, send their kids to better schools, to get an additional car for their teenage, etc.

But unlike us, because of the nature of the career, the most important thing a politician must do to get elected and to rise in power is to lie about that. Professional politicians are fundamentally different from normal people because they must have the ability to lie without conscious and tell us they are working for our best interest instead of their best interest. So from the first moment a person chooses the career path of professional politician, his success is dependent on his or her talent as a liar. In order to be highly successful, the politician must be a sociopathic quality liar. It's an fundamentally corrupting career choice that rewards liars and washing out honest people.

Thus we compress that knowledge into the joke.

Yet people still believe that government run by people who lie with sociopathic ease will work in our favor, though that's clearly impossible.

Everybody knows power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. The way to success as a professional politician is fundamentally different than the way to success in the private sector. In the private sector, people create wealth for others to get ahead. Workers who work harder and smarter in their job, creating more wealth for their employers, get promotions and raises. Businessmen who provide higher quality goods and services for their customers at a lower price make more money, expand their businesses and get rich. It's a virtuous cycle in which people are rewarded based on how much wealth and value they create for others.

Professional politicians get ahead by taking wealth and value from others by force. In order for politicians to gain more power, they need to take more tax dollars from taxpayers and apply that money to buying votes. Regardless of party, the more money a professional politician can take from taxpayers by force and funnel to special interests in return for votes, the more powerful the politician becomes. Using tax dollars, regulations, mandates, bans, etc., professional politicians funnel trillions of our tax dollars to their favored constituents, and in return, those constituents fill the coffers of those politicians with millions of our tax dollars then vote for them.

And this isn't just earmarks. Every ordinance, law or policy created by professional politicians follows this model. This is an inherently corrupt process that rewards not only the best liars, but the most adept at manipulating this corrupt process to buy votes.

I think the vast majority of Americans understand this, but they continue to think that if they just elect the right party or the right guy, government will become good government. It's impossible.

That's not the only way professional politicians are different from normal people. Because government is a process of lying, taking money from people by force and using it buy votes, the people attracted to the career of professional politician are people who covet lording power over others. Normal people who want to advance their careers become businessmen and CEOs. They produce goods and services that other people want to purchase in a system of voluntary exchange. Only people driven to bend others to their will choose the career of professional politician.

Most people understand this, yet they still convince themselves that government can work in our favor, though that's clearly impossible for this reason also.

Although we know the basic facts - politicians tend to share many character traits with serial killers and psychopaths - people continue to refuse to accept the indisputable conclusion drawn from these facts - there is no such thing as a government that works in the interest of the people. Government always and inevitably works for the interest of the professional politicians who run it at the expense of the people. There is no good government, only smaller, bad government and bigger, worse government.

It doesn't matter which party of professional politicians is in power. They're all self-interested freaks of nature who lie to get whatever they want, and what they want is to lord power over everybody else. They're all Napoleon wannabes. To the extent these people are unaccountable, and that can be measured by the size of budget of the government, the government is corrupt. Therefore corruption and harm done by a government is proportional to the size and scope of government. Everybody knows the government which governs least, governs best. But for all our knowledge, we continue to refuse to put into practice.

In the United States, all these bad qualities of professional politicians are exaggerated because we allow anybody, that means the worst of our 300,000,000 people, to run our government.

You can never separate the self-interest, character and corruption of professional politicians from the policy they make and the money they euphemistically redistribute. Everything government does is poisoned by them. There is no such thing as good government. The best we can do is keep government as tiny and powerless to harm us as necessary to keep the peace - and that's real tiny.