Very good points, Jeff. Libertarians frame “government” as this evil, monolithic external force to be opposed at all costs. But in reality, governments are just organizations of individuals. Governments are capable of both great evil and great good because they are comprised of humans with this dual nature. When organized collaboratively, the effect of human efforts can increase exponentially. This is how the greatest human accomplishments are achieved, but also how the worst human atrocities are committed.
By packaging “government” as this alien force responsible for the greatest evils, Libertarians are essentially throwing the baby out with the bathwater, also rejecting the great good that government’s organizational power can bring. We need that power to solve the many great problems that humanity faces, overpopulation, and environmental degradation.
Roy
On Fri, Jul 7, 2023 at 12:33 PM, Jeffrey Flintjeffrey.flint@gmail.com wrote: I always find it interesting that people often differentiate between, segregate, “humans” and “nature” as if humans are not a part of nature.
Similarly, people often differentiate and segregate “humans” and “government” as if humans were not a part of government, as if in fact the government was not made of humans. The ills and promise of governments are all very human. Governments are organized humans.
Governments are not a lost cause; the Constitution of the USA shows that to be the case. It is possible to create a “governmental technology” that protects humans from themselves.
Jeff
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On Fri, Jul 7, 2023 at 9:12 AM Starchild sfdreamer@earthlink.net wrote:
Beyond the most odious and morally repellent things that governments do – genocide, democide, torture, war, police murder, prison slavery, systemic corruption, etc. – there is a whole level of routine outrages that normally fly under the radar or get taken for granted. The book “The Permission Society: How the Ruling Class Turns Our Freedoms into Privileges and What We Can Do About It”, by Timothy Sandefur, does a good job shining a light on some of this layer and how it operates.
An excerpt:
“A politician runs for office on a platform promising, say, to stop pollution. Once in office, he writes a bill that forbids anyone from emitting pollutants without a permit—and also establishes a new bureaucratic agency charged with determining what qualifies as a “pollutant” and how one goes about getting a permit.
Once the bill is passed, the politician can tell his constituents that he has taken bold action to solve the problem and move on to the next issue. While voters are applauding his achievement, the new agency begins writing regulations, often with little public attention. These regulations are intricately complex, are backed up by severe penalties, and sometimes have nasty unintended consequences.
The unelected officials employed by the agency have every incentive to interpret their mandate as broadly as possible because, after all, they act ‘in the public interest.’ Within a few years, the agency has implemented thousands of petty and complicated rules, which are in effect a code of laws that no elected official ever approved and which neither they nor the voters can realistically control.
If the agency ever takes a step that causes a controversy in the media—for instance, declaring a July 4 fireworks display to be illegal “pollution”—the politician who wrote the law can shake his head, claim that was not his intention, and chide bureaucrats for going too far—again winning the applause of voters. But since nothing short of a new law is likely to rein the bureaucracy in, he can probably do nothing meaningful about it, even if he wants to.”
I suspect this is erroneous only in suggesting that politicians do much of the actual law-writing themselves.
More insights at https://wng.org/roundups/the-out-of-control-bureaucratic-branch-of-government-1617230148
Love & Liberty,
((( starchild )))