I have always wondered why so many people place so much stake in centralized governmental power. There are many people across all political spectrums who believe that we must have some form of government to some degree and I wonder if that is what it takes for Statism to ultimately win in the end. The moment that you concede that there has to be some form of government power, you have just given the Statist, the elites who seek to rule over us, their victory. Granted, it may not happen right away, but it will eventually.
Government is nothing more than the collectivization of the use of force for a specific purpose. Usually, this purpose is to protect against foreign invasion and to administer justice. But the reasons for such collectivized power are always based on this singular principle: human beings are flawed individually and their flaws must be controlled by force, if nothing else.
From day one, we are prone to sin. You may call it something else, like bad behavior, but we all tend to agree that there is some fundamental right and wrong way to live. It is like there is something missing within us or something was incomplete when we were made. While there are many philosophical and theological discussions that entail this train of thought, I’m really not interested in hashing that out here.
The premise that we are flawed and prone to wrong behavior is what drives the need for the establishment of government. There are more people out there who do good than do bad things and these good people wish to be protected from the few malcontents who exist in our society. These malcontents are not limited by their sense of conscious and desire to do harm to others. They may exist within a particular group or outside of it, it doesn’t matter really. The problem is questioning how we are to deal with such individuals and government is the commonly accepted solution.
The trouble with all this is, how much can we really trust the government to properly do its due diligence? After all, government is not some entity void of human contact, it is made up of individuals as well who are tasked with the sacred duty of managing the affairs of government. The power that the government derives is usually from the consent of the governed, that is the individuals who rely on government to use that force for their benefit. If the individuals in government loses the consent of the governed, they either end up losing their positions or resort to turning their own force against the people they are sworn to ‘protect’.
Since we are all individuals and we are all flawed at that, why do we assume that the individuals in government are better than we are at using that force we grant them? When we allow a monopoly of the use of force to exist in the form of a government, why are we shocked and dismayed when they do bad things themselves? Why do we justify immoral acts perpetrated on others by government?
The answer is simple: we are all afraid of what will happen if government was not there to protect. As much as sin has been a part of our existence from the moment we left our mother’s womb, government has been there as well. We have been indoctrinated in the government-run schools, had our money go away in the form of taxation and inflation, and watched as our very lives are toyed with as if we were sheep or lemmings and not the individuals that our Creator made us out to be.
This is the fear that the government and its Statist sycophants will use to coerce the majority of us to accept government as the only solution for dealing with the malcontents who seek to do us harm. In doing so, they have become malcontents themselves because men desire to rule over others. Take any bum in the street and put him in a position of high power and the result will more than likely be the same. It is time we recognized that the way of government is not the only way to ensuring our safety and freedom.
Once you acknowledge that fundamental truth, you will find yourself losing your fear and closer to true freedom. A professor once said to me that if someone holds a gun to your head and told you do something, you would achieve freedom if you could accept the consequences of your choice, be it to do that task or to not do it. Because there is always a choice in whatever you do and having freedom means you are perfectly willing to accept the final outcome of your choices.
So there is no need for government, only a desire for it. There are always alternatives, which may or may not be better, but we must begin to unravel the myth of the necessity of government.