M

y critique of government is based on the idea that there exist ethical principles which are external to government - i.e., which exist independently of government. Many statists assert the opposite idea: that there are no such independently-existing principles, and that government is necessary for (among other things) the creation of ethical principles.

The flaw in their argument is that if there were no independently- existing ethical principles then there would be no principles according to which a government could be established, and no means by which the behavior of government could itself be judged. Since the ostensible purpose of law is to protect rights, if there are no natural rights then there can be no standard for judging the legitimacy or efficacy of government-made laws. (See Chapter 5 * Natural Rights) See reference

When a social metaphysician (an individual who holds the consciousnesses of other people, not objective reality, as his ultimate frame-of-reference) becomes a politician, he aquires the coercive power to impose his decrees upon other people. This is his way of manipulating "reality." Here you see a psychological explanation for the attitude held by many stateolatrists: that the government is the ultimate foundation for morality, ethics, and law. This also helps explain why many tyrants have the certainty that their decrees actually do constitute reality, and why those tyrants are often quite literally incapable of perceiving any inherent contradictions in their laws. In their minds, the law IS reality. But if government were actually the foundation of morality, if social justice did in fact spring from law, then laws would in fact create the social justice which they are ostensively intended to create. The existence of widespread injustice proves this statist thesis to be wrong. The practical implementation of that idea, by both fascist and communist States, has resulted in the most horrendous atrocities the world has ever endured.

Government defined

This is also true of law. Government institutions of law have a purpose different from that of the institutions of common law. Common law and its institutions facilitate voluntary interactions; government law and its institutions implement involuntary interactions.

Not only is it the case that government intends to profit from the initiation of force, government is structured in such a way that its functioning can ONLY result from the initiation of force. Without taxation, government could not function. This is the reason why government cannot mitigate failure without also eliminating opportunities for success.

A critique of the Randian view:
Rand defined government as "an institution that holds the exclusive power to enforce certain rules of social conduct in a given geographical area. A government is the means of placing the retaliatory use of physical force under objective control."

Attempting to circumvent its implications for coercion, others expand on this definition by claiming that in a free society the government is prohibited by a constitution from initiating force.

Barbara Branden makes perhaps the best presentation of the Randian view of government. She claims that government is

"a social agency that performs the task of formulating and enforcing the laws of a country. The concept does not entail that a function of that political body will be the initiation of force. But because it is true that a factual function of government IS the initiation of some extent of force, people fail to grasp the possibility of an alternative to that factual function. They fail to separate the concrete from the abstraction. They have failed to differentiate some particular instances of government from the abstraction as such."

There are several flaws in these notions:
If, as Rand claims, the institution has exclusive power, how can it be prevented from aggressing since, being exclusive, there can be no restraining power to stand against it? The initiation of force cannot in any way be prevented except by bringing to bear against it an equal or greater force. But if government holds exclusive power, then there cannot exist any greater force, and thus government cannot be limited in the use of its force. As used by Rand, the concepts of "exclusive" and "objective control" preclude one another.

The constitutionalists make the mistake of confounding the notion of "prohibit" with the notion of "prevent." It is quite obvious that to forbid some action is by no means to prevent that action, and the idea that a document can, of itself, pose a restraint on the behavior of an organization of men possessed with weapons of destruction, is simply absurd. The only thing that can counter the power of a gun is another gun. A written constitution won't stop a policeman's bullet, no matter how vigorously you wave it, nor how vociferously you assert its provisions. As Mao Tse Tung taught, "All government power grows out of the barrel of a gun." Thus it follows that all anti-government power MUST also grow out of the barrel of a gun.

The abstraction that Barbara Branden comments on is not an abstraction from perceivable concretes - there is not now and never has been a government that did not aggress against its subjects. It is not "some particular instances of government" that manifest this attribute, it is ALL instances of government that do so. The aggression is a universal and FUNDAMENTAL characteristic of ALL governments. It is universal because every government, to be territorially exclusive, must compel every person within its domain to acquiesce in its sovereignty. It is fundamental because that acquiescence underlies all the other functions of government. Aggression is therefore a definitive characteristic in forming the concept "government." It is not epistemologically proper to hypothesize a non-existent concrete (a government without aggression) and subsume it within an abstraction. Barbara restricts the abstraction to an unjustifiably narrow set of particulars, and in so doing creates not a valid concept but a fiction.

To speak of a government that does not aggress is like talking about a vegetarian cat. This is a phenomenon that you can IMAGINE, but it is not something that exists in reality. This view of government is rather like the belief in cold fusion or the planarpophagous view of memory transfer.

We must perceive things as they are, not as we might want them to be.

The word "government" has an easily discernable meaning which can be seen by anyone who looks deeply enough into the factual nature of its fundamental distinguishing characteristic. To think about, and talk sensibly about, a phenomenon which does NOT share that fundamental distinguishing characteristic, we should select a verbal label different from the one that is already applied to the entity which DOES possess it. Thus it is improper to use the word "government" in the way the Randites use it. If we could institutionalize non-aggression we could not properly call it "government."

Nock made a distinction between the State and Government:
"Government is an agency with strictly limited powers, devoted to protecting individual rights to life, liberty and property. The State, on the other hand, is an offshoot of government that develops when some people capture the machinery of government and pervert it, using its powers not to protect rights, but to violate them, to exploit people by confiscating their wealth, regulating their activities, and subjugating them whenever necessary to enhance its own illicit power."

This distinction is spurious. "Government," as Nock describes it, is something that has never existed. The State is not an offshoot of government - something that develops from the corruption of government - the State is in fact the only one of the two institutions described by Nock that has existed in history. Except for some private agencies, limited in scope and subsumed by the State, there has in fact never been what Nock calls a Government.

A conceptual distinction can be made between the coercive institution I have described above as "government" and the more general notion of "the means by which order is maintained in a society" (the means may not necessarily be a government). Some people would use "state" to denote the first and "government" to denote the second, but this would be ambiguous - for communication - in view of the widespread equivalence between the words "state" and "government," so I will use "state" and "government" synonymously, and use "governance" to denote the idea of "a means by which order is maintained in a society."

Coercive power is that which defines government and makes government different from any other social institution. All other differences between states and other institutions flow from this fundamental characteristic. Thus the proper definition of government is "the strongest gang of aggressors in a particular area at a particular time."

Descriptions of Government

Gandhi: "The State represents violence in a concentrated and organized form. The individual has a soul, but as the State is a soulless machine, it can never be weaned from violence, to which it owes its very existence."

Mencken: "The typical lawmaker of today is a man devoid of principle - a mere counter in a grotesque and knavish game. If the right pressure could be applied to him he would be cheerfully in favor of polygamy, astrology, or cannibalism." [Or infanticide, as we have seen in Philadelphia and Waco.]

Lane: "The nation is nothing at all but simple force. Not in a single nation are the people of one race, one history, one culture, nor the same political opinion or religious faith. They are simply human beings of all kinds, penned inside frontiers which mean nothing whatever but military force."

The essential characteristic of States and quasi-States (e.g., the PLO and the IRA) is that they initiate force to implement their policies. Viewing the State all through history, we can see no way to differentiate the activities of its administrators from those of a professional criminal class. Thus there are no ethical differences between a hoodlum protection racket and a State, save scale, sophistication, and success in conning the victims into acceptance of its behavior.

Rand was wrong about the government's desire to maintain a semblance of morality. Although I believe such a desire existed in the past (until the last half of the 20th century), a "semblance of morality" implies that there exists a moral principle which is external to the government and which the government considers itself under obligation to abide by. Such a consideration is impossible within a context in which all morality is derived from the government.

Corruption in Government

Being merely human, a percentage of bureaucrats can be expected to be corrupt, thus as the number of bureaucrats increases there will be more corruption. By the same token, increased legislated criminalization means that more property rights are controlled by government, thus there comes to be greater scope for corruption. The more severe are the legal constraints on private markets, the more valuable become the rights controlled by government, thus the reward for corruption increases.

"In every government on earth is some trace of human weakness, some germ of corruption and degeneracy, which cunning will discover and wickedness cultivate." ... Thomas Jefferson

Police corruption occurs in those areas where entrepreneurs would supply voluntary services to consumers, but where the government has decreed that those services are illegal: drugs, prostitution, gambling, etc. Where gambling, for example, is outlawed, the law places into the hands of the police the power to sell the privilege of engaging in the gambling business. In short, it is as if the police were empowered to issue special licenses for these activities, and then proceeded to sell these unofficial licenses at whatever price the traffic will bear. Whether consciously or not, the government proceeds as follows: first it outlaws certain businesses, then the police sell to would-be entrepreneurs the privilege of engaging in those businesses.

This is one area in which the most frequently-heard apologia for government is quite true: government is necessary to create the infrastructure upon which rests other social behavior. As well as providing the legal infrastructure for police corruption, for the immigration horror stories, for the drug war violence, and for countless other ills, the government also provides the infrastructure for more general moral and ethical wickedness, through the teachings in its compulsory education program (see Chapter 11), and through the examples of its own vicious behavior: young people who base their ethos on government are getting their examples from the Rodney King video. See reference

Be that as it may, given the unfortunate and unjust laws, the police corruption described above may be highly beneficial to society. Society may be better off if corruption induces police to ignore many of the victimless crimes, thus leaving police resources available to prevent real crimes. Ignoring many laws, such as housing codes and oil import restrictions, would improve social welfare. In a number of countries, there would be virtually no trade or industry at all in the absence of the "corruption" that nullifies government prohibitions.

But how sane is the moral foundation of an institution that requires the corruption of its members to achieve beneficial ends?

As I try to make clear in my writings, I oppose government not only for what it is and what it does, but also for what it makes possible. Getting rid of government would not directly eliminate all the ills of the world, but it would free people to eliminate those ills themselves - "to take out their own garbage" as I put it. The elimination of those ills is something that government has clearly failed to do.

The Real Function of Government

   40% surveillance of political groups 
   30% internal administrative matters 
   15% "ordinary" crime 
    7% military AWOLs and deserters 
    7% draft resisters 
    1% organized crime 

Every employee at every level of every government department is affected and all those expensive people think they have to DO SOMETHING to justify their salaries, and every action is another interference with freedom, keeping people from doing what they want to do or making them do things they don't want to do. A bureaucrat dreads being accused of doing nothing - he has to do something to make it look like he's DOING SOMETHING - so he will continually proliferate rules. One result is that the American court system is drowning in the avalanche of legal pollution that could appropriately be called hyperleges.

Government pours forth a continuous stream of legislation, forcing pro- freedom groups to spend time, energy and money defending old gains rather than reaching for new ones.

If we view crimes as being behaviors that conflict with the interests of the segments of society that have the power to shape government law, then we realize that the government merely tries to balance the demands of conflicting interest groups, and to discriminate among them on the basis of their relative electoral power in order to determine who gains and who loses.

A primary function of government is to act as a mechanism to take wealth from some and transfer it to others. Governments protect individuals' property against the depredations of others as a shepherd protects his sheep from shearing by others. But against their own government, individuals have to protect their accumulated wealth as best they can themselves.

Special interest politics is a simple game. A hundred people sit in a circle, each with his pocket full of pennies. A politician walks around the outside of the circle, taking a penny from each person. No one minds; who cares about a penny? When he has gotten all the way around the circle, the politician throws fifty cents down in front of one of the people, who is overjoyed at the windfall. The process is repeated, ending with a different person. After a hundred rounds, everyone is a hundred cents poorer, fifty cents richer, and happy. And the politician walks off with fifty bucks in his pocket!

The modern welfare state is merely a complicated arrangement by which nobody pays for the education of his own children, but everybody pays for the education of everybody else's children; by which nobody pays his own medical bills, but everybody pays everybody else's medical bills; by which nobody provides for his own old-age security, but everybody pays for everybody else's old-age security; and so on.

Those who claim that government, bad though it may be, is an absolute necessity for protecting people against crime, must explain the fact that for every 1000 crimes the American police are aware of, only one criminal is ever sentenced to prison.

Nor does government protect people against foreign aggression - on the contrary, it coerces the people (by means of what is euphemistically called "selective service") into protecting and preserving the government's own existence.

What Government Responds to

WHAT THEY PERCEIVE TO BE THE WILL OF THE MAJORITY OF THE VOTERS.

In this statement I use three terms very carefully and deliberately: perception, will, and majority (not the majority of the whole population, but the majority of the voters).

Most political behavior is not based on the will of the majority, but is based on what the politician PERCEIVES to be the will of the majority. (This explains the influence of lobbyists and other pressure groups.) Of course, this does not account for ALL political behavior - a lot of it is straightforwardly venal, and much is intended simply to increase the power of government. But in almost all situations where the issue under consideration is the subject of considerable publicity, the politician will do what he THINKS the MAJORITY of the voters WANT him to do. I believe there are no limits to this. None whatsoever. They believe that God's Ultimate Truth is engraved upon the impermanent stone of political polls, and, as Mencken observed, they would, if they thought it politically expedient, legislate infanticide just as readily as they voted in Prohibition and the War on Drugs.

This thesis leads to an answer to the question: "Why don't politicians understand principles?" If my argument is correct, then it is an immediate conclusion that politicians CANNOT have principles (except the one that I have attributed to them). Any man who insists on shaping his behavior by reference to ethical or moral principles, rather than electoral pragmatism, would probably not get elected. If his insistence on principle were to be adamant while he was in office, he would surely not get re-elected. Thus I see a selection process in action - a process which ensures that politicians will not be the sort of people who understand and act on principles.

The notion that politicians refer to "accepted religious principles" has considerable merit too. If the politician cannot see, clearly and explicitly, the will of the majority, he will act by default, as it were. He will consult whatever set of "principles" he holds implicitly, usually some set of religious ethics or, lacking that, a collection of cliches and platitudes.

Political Intentions are Irrelevant

For example, police training systematically presents the idea that it is right to force others to obey orders. Thus individuals who become police are subjected to gradual changes in themselves which, like the motion of the hands on a clock, may be difficult to see at any particular moment, but which are nonetheless inexorably cumulative. A man or woman of only moderately authoritarian tendencies at the time of first entering the police force soon begins to accelerate down the path to savagery. Perhaps the first time he witnesses fellow officers beating up a suspect, the new recruit is astonished and horrified. But he says nothing because so many officers with greater experience and authority accept the violence. The next time, the new recruit looks the other way and feels terribly upset. By the third time, he merely thinks: "Oh no, not this cruelty again." By the twentieth or the thirtieth time, the no-longer-rookie cop is accustomed to seeing such injustice, and after many years on the force, such a man or woman thinks nothing of performing such acts. But nowhere along the line could the cop see himself turning into a bully. He sees himself as civilized, but a policeman is civilized only so long as those under his authority act in such a way as not to arouse his innate savagery. Remember, no one can initially become a policeman unless he has already accepted the basic premise that coercion is ethically proper. His willingness to enforce victimless crimes is the direct proof that he is non-libertarian.

Power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely. What this means is that brutality affects the tyrant, too. Once a person becomes accustomed to it, that person's mind changes, becoming farther and farther dissociated from reality. Eventually, the trappings of tyranny become an inherent part of his nature in a process so gradual and seemingly so logical that he hardly knows what has taken place. He IS what he's done over the years.

When a dog urinates on a fire hydrant, he's not committing vandalism. He's just being a dog.

No matter how well-meaning the individual policeman may be, the parameters of the institution in which he functions compel upon him this alternative: to accept the conditions of the institution or to withdraw from participation in it. Part of "accept the conditions of the institution," whether it is a police institution or a military institution, is the requirement that the participant renounce his own moral autonomy, abandon his own sense of ethical judgment and allow himself to become the instrument of the judgments of his superiors: he must sell his soul. Once he has done this there are no limits to the wickedness he is capable of. He has lost that dimension of the spirit which defined his humanity.

It doesn't take an advanced degree in Sociology to understand what I'm trying to say. My thesis was encapsulated with remarkable precision and clarity in this comment from a teenage high-school dropout residing in an inner-city ghetto: "Naw, I could never be a cop. Cops gotta fuck with people. I couldn't do that for a living."

"When statesmen forsake their own private conscience for the sake of public duties they lead their country by a short route to chaos."... Sir Thomas More.

And after he has done it for a sufficient length of time, he will become so immersed in the life that no other alternative will be conceivable to him. "When National Socialism has ruled long enough, it will no longer be possible to conceive of a form of life different from ours."... Adolph Hitler.

Many men have no honor, but at least it is possible for an individual man to have honor. It is not possible for a government to have honor, simply because no one within it can keep his honor while continuing to condone and participate in the dishonorable behavior that is an inevitable concomitant of government.

Every individual who begins working within the political system in an effort to accomplish anything enlarges the system by his own presence. This is always true, even when the intent of the activist is the reduction of government.

Success in the free market rewards the virtues of thrift, hard work, and far-sighted entrepreneurship. Success in politics, on the other hand, rewards the ethical vices of demagogy, mendacity, and expertise in the wielding of terror and coercion. The politician's job consists in sacrificing some men to others. Thus, no matter what choices he makes, they cannot be just. Proceeding from an unjust basis, he can have no rational standards by which to judge. Hence, the good people - from any rational point of view - will tend to rise to the top in a free society, while ethical scum will tend to rise to the top of a statist system.

The idea that the Libertarian Party can effect any changes in the performance of government is based on an incorrect assumption: that there can be honest, sane and benevolent people among members of the government. Even if a man desires very strongly to accomplish some good and beneficial end, he cannot do it through means which are fundamentally evil and, by acting via these evil means, he makes himself immoral REGARDLESS OF HIS INTENTIONS. It is as impossible for an honest and just man to participate in government as for an atheist to become an archbishop. Or a priest to become an abortionist. In each case, the alternatives differ in terms of fundamental principles so opposed that there is no possibility of overlap.

The purpose of becoming a politician is to compel your values on other people. Although you can become a political candidate for the purpose of using the election process as a means of education, you cannot use a political office except by means of coercion. That is simply not possible.

Throughout the history of government, there has been one thing only that has tied government behavior to the facts of reality: the necessities of military action. When you are making guns and bombs, you HAVE to know what reality is. Without this compelling link to reality, all government behavior would be totally insane. Even with it, most government behavior is irrational at best - madness otherwise.

Failures and Contradictions of Government

Here I want to present just a few examples of how government fails in practice. If you read the newspapers and newsmagazines regularly, you will quickly see that these examples are merely tiny drops in the huge bucket of government's incompetence and viciousness.

One of the unintended consequences of tyranny is that it forcibly stultifies creative endeavor. The object of a tyrant is to control everything in his domain. He cannot control something which he does not understand, therefore all things which he does not understand must be forbidden.

As was very clearly explained to me one day by a local sheriff, he has not only the legal authority, but a legal mandate to interdict anything that HE considers to be unusual behavior. There I was, faced by an armed thug with an IQ of probably about 90 (maybe 95 on a good day), demanding that I give him an account, comprehensible to HIM, of my behavior. My behavior is generated by the choices and decisions of a mind whose IQ is 70 points higher than his, and yet that behavior must, by authority of law and force of arms, be subsumed within HIS cretinous intellectual frame of reference. The "unintended consequence" of this situation, and of tyranny in general, is that genius is constrained to function within the limited scope of mediocrity. Thus your society is forcibly deprived of a chemist, a mechanical engineer, a computer programmer (merely a few of the endeavors I have turned my mind to over the years) and, as you have seen from the reading of MYBOOK, a somewhat bungling philosopher. What you DO get is only what the thug finds comprehensible: a dishwasher and a janitor. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is precisely what you DID get for the last 14 years of my working life. Think about this next time you step into a voting booth. Think about this next time you send a cheque to the IRS. How many creative minds does your tyrannous government turn off, directly or indirectly - intentionally or unintentionally?

The worst failing of tyranny is that it does not acknowledge the existence of human experience beyond the scope of its own ideas. Thus the greater the tyranny, the more impoverished the society, because it is restricted to that which lies within the frame-of-reference of the tyrant.

Freedom MUST be preserved! Not for the multitude who do not want it, but for the few who must have it in order to exercise their creativity.

The most notable examples (because they do not crop up periodically, but are continuous in their manifestation) of the incompetence of government are health-care in America and the environmental laws.

America has suffered a health-care crisis ever since government began passing laws regulating the medical profession. Every health care law ever passed has succeeded only in shifting the problems from one area to another - not in eliminating the problems, many of which have been caused by the laws that were intended to relieve them.

America has suffered an environmental crisis ever since government began passing laws intended to preserve the environment. Every environmental law ever passed has succeeded only in shifting the problems from one area to another - not in eliminating the problems, many of which have been caused by the laws that were intended to relieve them.

Scientific American, March 1995, contains an essay describing the effects of The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, telling how, "in typical fashion, the lawmakers gave little forethought to the social and economic consequences of the act." Some of its consequences run "directly contrary to the ideal that motivated NAGPRA in the first place." In 1992, C. Timothy McKeown of the Department of the Interior stated that he would feel the department had done its job if all parties [to the act] were dissatisfied.

Consider the requirements of the Gramm-Rudman law. And their actual effect on the federal budget deficit. Gramm-Rudman was not the first attempt to balance the budget, only the best-publicized. Anyone who has kept track of the legal mandates of these laws, and their subsequent actual effects, knows that the government's batting average in this area is precisely zero. Are you sure you would want to invest any money on the assumption that the present (1995) debate on balancing the budget over the next seven years has any significance whatsoever? Don't be a fool. The federal budget will never be balanced, and the federal debt will never be paid.

The Minimum Wage: The first thing that happens when a law is passed that no one shall be paid less than $3 for an hour's work is that no one who cannot produce the equivalent of $3 an hour for his employer can be employed at all. You cannot make a man worth a given amount by making it illegal for anyone to offer him anything less. You merely deprive the employee of the right to earn the amount that his abilities would permit him to earn, while the employer is deprived even of the moderate services that the employee is capable of rendering. In brief, for a low wage the government substitutes unemployment.

The December, 1991, issue of SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN contains an excellent example of the precept that government is grossly inefficient at best, and counterproductive at worst.

An essay on "Homelessness in America" touts government as the only effective means of coping with the problem, and presents as an ideal remedy "a joint effort started in 1989 by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and HUD. Under the Homeless Families Program, nine cities, including Atlanta, Baltimore and Denver, will receive a projected $600,000 grant each over five years to implement services for homeless families. The program also makes available 1,200 Section 8 certificates, public housing assistance funds, worth about $35 million over five years.... To date, the initiative has helped more than 100 homeless families move from emergency shelters to permanent housing."

What you see here is the government providing 100 dwellings, but when you look slightly deeper you observe that in so doing, the government expropriated enough wealth to have provided 160 houses. How so? Well, consider that during the two-year period "to date," this project had spent over 16 megabucks to provide those 100 homes. (That comes to $160K per dwelling.) But this occurred at a time during which the average cost of a new house in America was less than $100K. The 16 Megabucks, if spent by private builders, would have provided 160 dwellings. The more the government spends on housing, the fewer houses there will be in relation to the number that could have existed without government intervention.

Robert Heinlein once remarked: "Ten-dollar hamburgers? Brother, we are headed for the hundred-dollar hamburger; for the barter-only hamburger. But this is only an inconvenience rather than a disaster as long as there is plenty of hamburger."

So far there is still plenty of housing and hamburger in America (at least in comparison with countries where housing and food production are completely controlled by government). But as government intervention in the economy becomes more and more pervasive, the economy will become less and less able to provide these (and other) necessities of life. And the fewer houses produced, the more people will clamor for the government to "do something about the problem of homelessness!" And every time it does something, there will be still fewer houses produced, simply because government is not the solution - government is the problem.

(For a more thorough account of the effects of government on the housing market read THE FEDERAL BULLDOZER by Martin Anderson.)

That same issue of SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN contains an article on America's Wetlands. In its attempt to preserve these ecological areas, the federal government has implemented several programs, including the 1972 Clean Water Act and the 1985 Swampbuster program. In spite of these schemes, some 300K acres of wetlands are lost every year, and the Department of the Interior estimates that less than half of America's original wetlands still exist.

The government's latest effort, the l991 Wetlands Guidelines, was used to evaluate 22 of Washington State's recognized wetlands. To the surprise of the scientists, only four of the 22 wetlands would still be so classified under the new rules. Many experts say the document is filled with inconsistencies and loopholes that could lead to the loss of designation for half of the nation's remaining wetlands. There are also several other bills pending in Congress that would alter the definition and relative value of wetlands. Each agency involved in wetlands management - the Army Corps of Engineers, the Fish and Wildlife Sevice, the Soil Conservation Service and the Environmental Protection Agency - uses different guidelines to define a wetland.

Secretary of the Interior Manuel Lujan, when asked to define 'wetlands' responded:

"I take the position that there are certain kinds of vegetation that are common in wetlands, pussy willows or whatever the name is. That's one way you can tell, and then if it's wet."

Here we see a situation worse even than the housing debacle described above. At least in the area of houses, there are SOME dwellings constructed as a result of the government's policies, even though the government's behavior in this area is grossly inefficient. But in its dealing with wetlands, the government is actually counterproductive. The more it passes laws and creates agencies, the more the wetlands vanish.

The automotive industry's anticorrosion treatments produce a zinc-rich sludge that in the past was sent to a smelter to recover the zinc and return it to the industry. But a decade ago regulations began listing such wastewater treatment sludges as hazardous. The unintended consequence is that the smelters can no longer receive the sludge, because it has become, in name, a hazardous material, and the regulatory requirements for accepting it are too severe. The zinc-rich sludge is redirected to landfills, thereby increasing costs for automobile manufacturers and producing a waste disposal problem for future generations. This situation clearly illustrates what is a serious problem: well-meant environmental regulations, because they put up high barriers to reuse, often have the bizarre effect of increasing both the amount of waste created and the amount to be disposed. They might more accurately be viewed as anti-recycling regulations.

The imposition of restraints on Japanese automobile imports to the USA during the 1980s shifted the composition of those imports away from small cars and towards larger cars, as the Japanese attempted to increase their revenues without increasing the number of units they sold. Yet larger cars are relatively fuel inefficient. Thus the protective efforts of the US government had the unforeseen consequences of increasing the average amount fuel used and pollution produced by imported cars.

The police cannot prevent crimes, rarely solve crimes - or even find out about them - and certainly do very little to rehabilitate criminals. Worse yet, once they have the training they naturally want to use it, and they see one of the safest ways of doing so in the enforcement of victimless crime laws.

As of 1990, the San Francisco police will no longer investigate burglaries where the value of goods stolen is under $10K. Nor will they investigate bad-check cases if the amount is under $2K. In 1988 they investigated only 26% of all violent crimes reported - but they spent 73 million dollars waging the drug war.

The Dade County police respond to only 2 out of 7 calls for help from their citizens.

The Savings and Loan industry is going down the tubes, US Banks are failing in record numbers, the FDIC is running out of money, loans are hard to come by even for the most creditworthy borrowers, and the economy merely creeps along despite remarkably low interest rates. Welcome to the latest banking crisis - in this era of central banking which was supposed to prevent such things. During more naive days, nearly everyone imagined that private banks were inherently unstable and that financial crises could be averted only through the good graces of wise regulators. Recent events make it quite clear that government intervention itself is a key source of instability.

The Federal Reserve governors base their hunches about inflationary pressures - and the actions required to stifle them - on selected economic indicators, but the indicators they monitor reflect the fact that inflation is a sequential process: it shows up first in wholesale prices, then in retail prices, then in wages. So by the time wages begin rising, it is too late for the Fed's actions to affect the primary cause of the phenomenon they are trying to deal with.

President Clinton has continually argued that because of a flaw in the free-market (sic) system, US companies invest so little in long-term research that they risk losing their technological edge to overseas competitors. But a long-term view of research investment will readily show that it is the fickleness of government intervention that so upsets the field. Politicians tend to be shortsighted by their very nature. Issues that don't affect their electoral prospects tend to drop out of their consideration. The usual rule of thumb is: out of congressional sight and interest, out of budget.

The Superconducting SuperCollider had a price tag of $12G. It was canceled by Congress in 1993 after about $2G had been spent - a worst of both worlds outcome.

As power shifted across the aisles of Congress after the 1994 elections, supporters of the Advanced Technology Program felt a chill creep into discussions of the program's future, which can no longer be taken for granted. Even its present is under debate. Congress is also threatening major changes in NIST's growth. But in the late 1980s it was Congress that had actively pushed for government promotion of commercial research. The rise of statism has seen a general economic thrust away from far- sightedness and the building of capital and toward destructive looting of the stock of capital for short-term profit. The increasing scope of law- making, and its associated transfers of property rights from private individuals to government, undermines the private property arrangements that support a free market system. This process creates considerable uncertainty about the future value of those private rights that have not yet been seized by government. When resource owners are relatively uncertain about their continued ownership of those resources, they tend to use them up relatively rapidly and have less incentive to enhance future production capabilities. Thus resources will be overused and underproduced. Even for statist-minded businessmen, the inevitable erosion of confidence in the future that results from the government's continual policy reversals, irresolution in the face of electoral whims, and stifling bureaucracy, makes long-term business planning impossible.

Ask yourself what products and services are currently least satisfactory and have shown the least improvement over time. Postal service, elementary and secondary schooling (one of the government's greatest failures is the public school system), police protection, sewage disposal, and railroad passenger transport would surely be high on the list. Ask yourself which products are most satisfactory and have improved the most. Household appliances, TV and radio sets, computers, supermarkets and shopping centers would surely come high on that list. The shoddy products are all produced by government or government-regulated industries. The outstanding products are all produced by private enterprise with little or no government involvement. Yet the public has been persuaded that private enterprise produces shoddy products, that we need ever more government employees to keep business from foisting off unsafe products at outrageous prices on us poor ignorant and vulnerable consumers. What the government refers to as "Fair Trade" consists largely of the government devising new ways to protect consumers against the scourge of low prices and high quality.

Regulation of economic activity is often justified and upheld by the courts on the fictitious grounds that a laissez-faire economy inevitably leads to "excesses" and "abuses," necessitating regulation which amounts to prior restraint upon private freedom of action; yet similar attempts at prior restraint of government action are routinely struck down, even as judges cite the resulting excesses and abuses as a small price to pay for "freedom." In every session of all the legislatures of America, programs to solve the nation's debt, create jobs, and remedy social problems are launched with great fanfare and wonderful speeches. But then, when no one is looking, the politicians go back to their offices and the promises are forgotten. Although the scenarios that triggered the programs are frequently discredited, the bureaucracy permanently retains all the power it accumulated through the legislation that created the programs.

With such great fanfare and wonderful speeches, the Humphrey-Hawkins "full employment" bill was enacted in 1978 (when the unemployment rate was 6.1%). It set a national goal of reducing unemployment to 4% by 1983. In 1983 the unemployment rate was 9.6%.

In 1850, when Massachusetts became the first state to force children to go to school, the literacy rate in that state was 98%. Today, after nearly 150 years of compulsory government schooling, the literacy rate is 91%

Many government institutions, intended to help people deal with emergencies, start on small budgets. As the years go by the bureaucrats who run these agencies want to rise in professional standing. They make connections with congressmen; they find reasons to appropriate more money; they hire more people. They rise, become more powerful, and the more these agencies grow the more they clamor for money and personnel. Meanwhile the budget deficit grows from the spending orgy. The public rebels, and the competition gets ugly. Now money goes to who screams the loudest in the halls of government. To get the government's attention, they must have something scary to scream about, so they create an atmosphere of fear. Now that a "terrible doom" is around the next corner, science sidesteps the caution of peer review and jumps to science-by-press-release. The public is left, not with an understanding, but with an emotion.

Because those in favor of a government subsidy have much at stake, their lobbying efforts will be intensive and well financed. To the individual taxpayer, however, the impact will be at most a few dollars a year. Accordingly, opposition is usually muted and dispersed. In concert with the lobbyist is the politician. Being human, he seeks a measure of personal importance, prestige and influence. Thus his interests are not served by minimizing the role of the state, but by maximizing the role of the institution of which he is a part. He will have a natural inclination to insist that increased regulation is the appropriate remedy for any social problem. And so, year by year and decade by decade, the bureaucracy grows larger and larger, and the tax burden builds higher and higher. Totalitarians eventually gain the advantage, and it is merely a matter of time before freedom is extinguished.

As the problems created by partial controls multiply, there is a logical extension of partial controls to universal controls and it is here that the full and horrible price of abandoning free market principles is made explicit. Productive capacity and the incentive to work decline continually; and therefore the government is eventually led to seize control over all production and distribution.

Even when the people become aware that the government is hideously bloated, they have little incentive to curtail it. On the one hand, people don't have the foggiest understanding of "spontaneous order," i.e., that problems can be solved by unplanned processes that are not the result of any controlling authority's specific intentions or conscious designs. (The economic process by means of which everyone is provided with shoes is an example of such a "spontaneous order" phenomenon.) On the other hand, people don't understand that many of the social problems they face are the result of past government actions, and that the only real solution for them is an indirect one, to wit: to repeal earlier programs and let individuals take care of things themselves.

The argument that the functions of government law are the assignment of property rights and the protection of those rights is a dishonest argument. Government governs by means of mediating wealth transfers, imposing behavior controls, and protecting (and expanding) its institutions. But don't expect honesty from government: in June of 1984, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that prosecutors need not honor plea-bargain agreements. The Court maintained that as long as a plea-bargain agreement is "voluntarily accepted by a suspect with full awareness of the consequences," prosecutors are not bound to abide by it.

It seems that the more open and forthright the government is, the less obliged it is to be honest!

How well do delinquency treatment programs reduce recidivism? On average, 45% of program participants are rearrested, versus 50% of those left to their own devices. Programs that concentrate on teaching job skills and rewarding pro-social attitudes cut rearrest rates to about 35%. "Scared Straight" and "Boot Camp" programs actually tend to increase recidivism slightly. Some of the seemingly best ideas have led to worsening of the behavior of those subjected to the ideas. Locking kids up will not reduce crime and may eventually make the problem worse.

One study tracked 10K males, born in Philadelphia in 1945, for 27 years; it found that just 6% of them committed 71% of the homicides, 73% of the rapes and 69% of the aggravated assaults attributed to the entire group.

If one were to predict that every boy in the study who was arrested early would go on to commit violent crimes, one would be wrong more than 65% of the time. Those so misidentified are known as false positives. All delinquency prediction models consist of about 50% false positives.

Just how violent is the American workplace? A report in the WSJ (13Oct94) reveals that 59 employees were killed by co-workers in 1993, out of a total national workforce of 121 million people. That is one in 2 million. The National Weather Service puts the odds of getting struck by lightning at one in 600K.

A series of overblown news reports, widely misinterpreted research and an emerging army of consultants have driven companies to a fear of their own workers that is unjustified. Executives are scared to death, but they're scared of the wrong thing.

According to the Statistical Abstract of the USA, the per capita loss to crime each year is $5760. But this pales in comparison to the $20470 that you could put into your pocket each year if government were abolished. (You can calculate this amount by summing up the total revenues of all federal, state, and local governments, then dividing that sum by the number of non- government working people. The figures above are for the year 1990.)

There are always the types who insist on running the show but who wouldn't lift a finger to take out the garbage. Freedom means, in part, that we'll all have to learn to take out our own garbage, since in a free society no one will have the means to compel others to do it for us. Freedom makes demands on people. That's why government is so highly considered - it makes "the other fellow" do the work. One reason government in America is being pressured to create a socialized medical system is that such a system lets the government take care of another worry. An anarchist looks after him or herself. Too many people in this world can't and won't. They will look for a savior, a dictator or a committee to do the work, and will cheerfully make any sacrifice in order to be saved and cared for.

But the government answer has not worked; it will not work; it can not work. Unfortunately, the workable solutions are not permitted by government.

Government is a disease masquerading as its own cure. You can see the disastrous symptoms of this disease in the faces of the people. In their eyes you can see the flame of hope slowly dying, drowned by the harsh reality of survival in modern America as the nation sinks into the swamp of fascist tyranny.

Government Murders During the 20th Century

   War      35.7 (battle deaths:  WW1 9   WW2 15) 
   Non-war 150.5 
   Total   186.2 = 5% of earth's population during
   that period. This averages out to be one murder 
   every 15 seconds. 
   Communist governments: 126.2 
   Fascist governments:    23.4 
   Democratic governments:   .9 

Communists don't scare me; communist governments scare me, but the frightful thing is the government, not the communist. The Hutterite sect of Christianity, whose beliefs consist of pure and absolute communism, has existed for over 400 years, and during that time there has never been a murder by one of its members.

Keep in mind that this little expose of government murders includes only those people who were directly murdered by governments. It does not take into account the tens of millions who died in the deliberately-caused famines in the Soviet Union (8 million during the 1920s) and China (30 million during the 1950s). Nor does it count those poor unfortunates repatriated by the Allied governments in Operation Keelhaul. Nor does it encompass all the damage and suffering caused by enslavement, property seizure and income theft that are perpetrated on a regular basis by ALL governments.

Every minute 30 children die of hunger and disease. But during that same minute government spends the equivalent of 1.7 million dollars on war - war that is more and more directed against civilians: During WW1 civilians represented only 15% of all fatalities. By the end of WW2 the percentage had risen to 65%, including Holocaust casualties. In today's (1995) hostilities, more than 90% of all of those injured in war are civilians.

As Ayn Rand was fond of saying, the enormous population growth of the capitalist societies during the 19th century should of itself induce any life-loving person to embrace capitalism. Well, the perpetration of 186 million murders should of itself induce any life-loving person to reject government.

You have been told all your life that the police serve the people, that they are the guardians of civilization. During a recent one-year period (1986), these were the rates of murders committed by police in various American cities: (the government does not call these "murders," but they are killings by the police, in the line of duty, of innocent civilians who are not suspected of any crime. No prosecutions ensue from these incidents.)

  
   Dallas       .924 per 100K   (9) total
   Los Angeles  .743            (22) 
   Denver       .700            (4) 
   Houston      .462            (8) 
   NYC          .185            (14) 

The census bureau classifies the USA urban population as being 167M, or 74% of the total. Urban is considered to be communities of 50K or more. I assume that most of the murders occur in urban areas and so I use the 167M as a population base for these two extrapolations:

• 1. Using the lowest murder rate available (.185) there would be just over 300 murders per year nationwide.
• 2. Using the average of all the murder rates (.603) there would be just over 1000 murders per year nationwide.

You might ask "Who are these poor people?" (Keep in mind that police do not accidently kill people; when a policeman takes out his gun and shoots it, he is TRYING to kill somebody. When a civilian performs the same action, it IS considered by the government to be an act of murder.) They range from a 5-year-old boy in Stanton CA to a 70-year-old woman in Dallas. They include an entire family of 11 people (including 4 children) who were DELIBERATELY burned to death in Philadelphia by the city police department, who held off the fire department until the fire had done its grisly work. This happened in May of 1985. After a two-year investigation, the city government announced that "no laws had been broken" by anyone involved. And mayor Goode boasted (yes, it was actually a boast!) that "the city government is more powerful now than it was then."

During the decade of the 1960s the Philadelphia city police murdered its citizens at the average rate of one per week (2.5 per 100K on an annual basis). This caused such a scandal that it provoked an investigation by the Federal Justice Department and the city cleaned up its act a little bit even though there were no indictments.

And if deliberately (and legally) burning children to death does not convince you of the viciousness of government, what would? If you are a decent and benevolent person, you ought to believe in something different from what has killed so many people, and espouse an ethics that human beings could actually live by, and work for it to become real.

The War On Drugs

Total number of criminal offenses known to police:
   1980 13.4million     1990 14.4million   ^ 7% 

   Drug arrest rates (per 100K population) 
   1980 256    1985 346     1989 527      ^ 106% 

   Tried in U.S. District Courts: 
   Marijuana    1980 2,000  1990  5,000   ^ 150% 
   Other drugs  1980 3,000  1990 13,000   ^ 333%

   Sentenced to prison in U.S. District Courts:
   1980    Total 14,000   Drugs  4,000 
   1990    Total 28,000   Drugs 14,000 
                ^ 100%          ^ 250% 

For every 1000 non-drug arrests made by the police, three criminals get sentenced to prison. For every 1000 drug arrests, 16 are sent to prison.

An examination of the breakdown of the "Total number of criminal offenses" reveals that many categories of violent crime changed little during the 1980s. In fact, the increase in the total population of America has resulted in a per capita DECLINE in several of these rates:

 Total of offenses known: -2.2% 
   Murder: -7.8% 
   Total property crime: -4.9% 
   Burglary: -26.6% 

Some measures of the insanity of the Drug War:

The morphine required for a $100 fix from a dirty needle in a back alley could be purchased from the local drugstore for just $1, if not for the anti-drug laws. In 1973, John Hospers calculated that two-thirds of the violent crime in New York City would quite simply and quietly disappear overnight if all the drug laws were repealed, since that is the proportion of the crime that is caused by addicts who need the money for a fix. Half the prisoners in the Texas state prison system are there for violation of drug laws, NOT for violent crimes! How peculiar that the government does not blame the obesity of fat persons on the merchants who sell them food, but it does blame the drug habits of addicts on the merchants who sell them drugs.

On the positive side, it is clear that government itself would benefit from a change in drug policy: reclassifying marijuana possession from a felony to a misdemeanor reduced the felony caseload of the Los Angeles police by 25%.

You might think that sooner or later the government would realize the insane idiocy of its policy on drugs. But keep this in mind: although Prohibition lasted only 14 years, the Drug War has continued for over two generations with no sign of abating. Remember also that the Nazis did not abandon their persecution of the Jews, even when the manpower involved was critically needed to defend the gates of Berlin itself. Thus there is no reason to surmise the government will cease its insanity short of out-and- out social collapse.

I see another rationale for the government not only to continue this insanity, but to amplify it: An American's enthusiasm for law and order is directly proportional to the degree to which he believes his personal safety and livelihood are threatened. When the perceived threat grows, so does his willingness to be policed. If the average American can be led to believe, through the government's stridently minatory propaganda about drug use, that these "rabidly crazed" marijuana puffers (remember the movie, Reefer Madness?) pose a horrifying threat, then an increasingly alarmed public will demand that every federal, state, and local police resource be augmented to combat the "narco-terrorists." This is good news for police budgets nationwide.

It's asking a lot of a politician to defy a political culture that treats speaking reasonably about the pros and cons of legalizing drugs as if it were on a par with speaking reasonably about the pros and cons of infanticide.

Nor do I see hope in attempts to elicit public discussion of the issue. Discussion is futile when directed not toward general principles but merely toward the specific phenomena which are consequences of those principles. This precept becomes eminently clear during debates about legalizing drugs. They invariably degenerate from a very brief and superficial mention of the underlying principles into lengthy disputes over the specific means that would be used for distributing the drugs if they were to be legalized. But these disputes always assume the existence of a Controlling Authority that would have jurisdiction over drugs.

A disagreement that does not challenge fundamentals serves only to reinforce them. If, for the question: "Do you want slavery?" your opponents manage to substitute the question: "What kind of slavery do you want?" then they can afford to let you argue indefinitely; they have already won their point. Thus do the proponents of statism set the terms of the debate by swindling the advocates of Freedom into an implicit acceptance of the statist premise. If you allow them to get away with this, they will eventually end up setting the terms for everyone's life. But that is the ultimate goal of the State: to set the terms for everyone's life.

There are other, less widely-known, aspects of the government's drug policy that have severely detrimental effects on American society:

The FDA doesn't want anybody to be killed by medicines (that would look bad for the FDA's record) but they don't care how many people die of diseases resulting from the government's prevention of the development and sale of medicines.

Put yourself in the position of an FDA official charged with approving or disapproving a new drug. You can make two very different mistakes:

• 1. Approve a drug that turns out to be dangerous.
• 2. Refuse approval of a drug that would have been beneficial.

An examination of the therapeutic significance of drugs that are forbidden in the US but are available elsewhere in the world, such as in France, reveals this in action.

And in those instances where the approved drug turns out to be a bummer (such as Thalidomide), not only do the drug companies have a vested interest in concealing this (as the tobacco companies did for decades) but even the FDA has a vested interest in looking to justify its original decision to approve the drug.

As many as 95% of cancer patients can get relief if properly medicated. Tragically, many continue to suffer needlessly. A 1993 study found that 85% of the physicians who treat cancer patients provided inadequate relief for the majority of those in pain. What accounts for the astonishing gap between the degree of relief that is possible and the suffering that still persists in reality? Sadly, the effort to improve the management of pain has been enormously restricted by the war on drugs. The years of antidrug campaigns have left both the public and health care professionalds with greatly exaggerated fears about the risks of opioids, which are still the most effective known painkillers.

Many studies have shown that the medical use of analgesic drugs is safe and does not cause psychological addiction in those who had not previously shown such a tendency. Even when patients can administer the drug themselves with bedside pumps they rarely deliver more than they need to suppress their pain. Those who receive opioids may become physically dependent - that is, the drug must be withdrawn slowly to prevent the physical effects of withdrawal - but this state is very different from true addiction, which is characterized by constant craving and compulsive drug-seeking behavior.

The psychiatric profession is also deeply affected:

To therapists, the addict needs help to solve a problem, the problem being that he uses a drug of which they disapprove. But to the addict, the only problem is how to get the drugs he wants. He doesn't see himself as "sick," and he doesn't want "treatment." Authorities who are intervening to control his behavior react as tyrants always do - whether they be central planners trying to make their citizens conform to some national plan, or foreign policy planners trying to control people in other countries - by getting angry with the people who don't appreciate the intervention of "experts" into their lives. The victimizers, in short, blame the victims. They demand the right to enforce their ideas at the point of a gun, that is: through the power of government. And this IS a problem.

The principle role of medical, and especially psychiatric, professionals in the administration and enforcment of chemical statism is to act as double agents - helping politicians to impose their will on the people by defining self-medication as a disease, and helping the people to bear their privations by supplying them with drugs. This is a major national tragedy whose very existence has so far remained unrecognized, and whose consequences may be devastating. (See Chapter 12 - Dictatorship American Style. See reference)

Consider that the tranquilizer Valium is the most widely-prescribed drug in the USA. Its sale is a multi-billion dollar business. Suppose something happened that resulted in the cessation of its distribution (and also that of other similar drugs). What would be the effect on all those stressed people whose mental stability depends on such drugs? Kurt Saxon maintains that this might well be the most devastating result of a collapse of our economy. All those neurotics might go crazy and destroy everything in their environment.

It is laws which create much of social context - the Prohibition laws created the "Alcohol War" context. Today's Drug laws create today's "Heroin War" context. Unjust laws are creating a deeply divided and corrupt society, where the appearance of orthodoxy is everything, and intelligence, humanity and common sense count for almost nothing.

If a man long afficted by a toxic chemical suffers sudden convulsions and then dies from them, one might validly say that the convulsions were the immediate cause of the death, so long as one remembers the ultimate cause. The same is true of a country addicted to a toxic ideology.

Throughout history, rulers have picked on various scapegoats to divert attention from the results of their policies, including Jews, Christians, eccentrics and now drug users. If drugs were really so terrible why were they completely legal between 1776 and 1914 - without serious social problems? It is not the drug that is the problem, but the ideology of government.

Edmund Burke observed that "it is ordered in the eternal constitution of things that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters." Nor can men of infantile minds and childish habits be free. Their state-induced passions forge their fetters.

Governments cause pain, misery and suffering by passing laws, and then point to that same pain, misery and suffering (which were caused by the laws) as the reason the laws are necessary - and even why the laws should be more strongly enforced! Nowhere is this spurious chain of "cause and effect" more devastatingly manifest than in the War on Drugs. The real cause of immigration and drug-war horror stories is the enforcement of anti- immigration and anti-drug laws, not the people forced into dangerous and degrading circumstances by those laws. (When was the last time you read about armed thugs doing battle over the distribution of Aspirin or Valium?)