One question that often comes up is why the government seems to do such a lousy job protecting people? why it has been virtually hamstrung by special interest groups? I’ve had lengthy *drunken* discussions with my roommate, who is a law student, and one of the smarter people I know, and he, like many others, has trouble understanding why it’s so hard to form an elected government that won’t run away with our freedoms. I mean, we recognize the problem, and there are alot of people smarter than either of us who probably get it, too.
One of the cornerstones of the libertarian philospophy is that force is only justifiable in retaliation to someone who has initiated its use, or has demonstrated a credible threat. We also acknowledge that government has been granted a virtual monoply on the use of force.
We know that men are neither omniscient, nor perfect, and I think to grant them such an onerous responsibility as unfettered privelege to the use of force is primarily at fault. Not everyone, if entrusted with such a power would abuse it. Everyone has a different breaking point, an opportunity cost, if you will, of breaking the law, or selling out your moral standards. Some are much higher than others.But I think that the people who are most inclined to abuse it, those who have the lowest opportunity cost stand to gain significantly from the power and pull that accompanies their positions.
Once nested in power, those abusors can legitimize what would otherwise be reprehensible actions (the politics of pull, subsidies, discrimination, etc.) in order to secure favors, political support, etc. But they do a great job of covering this up, Capital Freedom identifies it as bundling, and I think that’s an accurate assertion. And from there, flows a vile sort of competition – this is the politics of pull in action, quid pro quo, favoritism, and so-on.
Additionally, that we allow the federal government (which our forefathers feared deeply) the power to create laws on a national basis – eliminates the free competition that may otherwise occur between states; eliminating the potential freedom experiment that could otherwise thrive.
We are basically being legislated and coerced into homogenization. The left is the new right, the right is the new left, and they’re all fucking centrists. Grasping at the power to satisfy whatever interest group currently carries the lion’s share of the public appeal.