I find myself with a few free moments this holiday morning and I wanted to respond to one of your blog posts.

“Remember: Government can’t do anything. It is contrary to the laws of physics. They can only move existing resources around. Only personal industriousness can create. Taxation is the power only to destroy.”

I respect what I think you’re trying to say here, that government, deriving its funding and authority as it does from the populous, cannot help but be viewed as a parasite from a certain perspective. I don’t think however that your comment above does our government complete justice. For example, our government protects our boarders from enemies, (both foreign and domestic), provides for roads and utilities which vastly increase our quality of life, provides (in theory) a neutral system by which to arbitrate disputes, and many other benefits that add up to peace and freedom. I suppose you can argue that peace and freedom come from the people and a lack of government, but I believe that it is the government as intended who maintains this status.

Where I can’t fault your logic is what our government has become in these troubled times. Where once we claimed to have a “free market” economy, now when a business falls to the pressure of supply and demand, we don’t let it fall, we prop it up, hoping to overt the inevitable demise of the institution. One of my friends said something lately in regard to the noises about baling out the auto industry that I found particularly appropriate.

“I wouldn’t buy their cars, why then should I pay to have them make more cars?”

At best we are supposed to have a symbiotic relationship with our government, benefitting from its existence, but not having it draw so heavily upon our resources that it significantly impairs our ability to generate goods, services, and wealth.

I think, say 100 years ago, we had this level of freedom. Now though, companies and special interests have grown so large and our political system has grown so polarized between conservative republicanism and liberal democrats, that we no longer elect people to represent us who act in service to their constituents. In point of fact our current system makes it very difficult for a person to get re-elected who truly acts in the best interest of the people and the country as a single unified entity.

This is because most campaigns are funded by special interests, special action groups, and companies who want to be remembered favorably when a law maker takes office. To get laws past, the law maker then has to make deals with other law makers (who were elected under the same circumstances and who are beholden to other groups and companies.) (For the record, I view our political parties as esentially special interest groups, much like unions or lobiest groups.) The law, designed to do something good and right, gets bundled with other laws such that the end product is that while the one law gets past, a bunch of other laws do as well which may not be representative of the elected officials and his constituents’ beliefs. The representative of the people should be free to vote as his people and his conscience dictate, not such that a few privileged companies and interest groups will fund him again or so that a different law he will propose later has a chance of passing muster.

If you haven’t done so already, I recommend reading a book by Michael Z. Williamson called Freehold.

The book depicts a free society in which government is but a shadow of our current system, where self-reliance is the standard, and where there are no social safety nets to speak of. It is a work of fiction, but depicts with disturbing clarity the difference between what we could become and what true freedo really means.

Best wishes to you and yours.