The Case Against Government (in Less Than 400 Words)

The simplest way to put it – a brief sketch that admittedly cannot begin to capture every subsidiary issue – may be this.

There are 7 billion people on the planet.  They each have a different set of preferences.  Indeed, even the preferences of a given individual may change from moment to moment.  You can either construct moral and legal rules that respect that diversity by allowing each individual to act without awaiting the permission – or fearing the violence – of all the others, or you can pretend that this incredible diversity does not exist and thus attempt to yoke all of these people into one plan (or a handful of plans), whether decreed by a fleeting majority coalition or simply a king, putting dissenters in jail.

Government, whether nominally left-wing, right-wing, authoritarian, social democratic, Islamist, or otherwise, is by definition the second option.  Governing each other is as wrong as taking a teeming bazaar full of people pursuing their varied interests, shackling them into a chain gang, and then claiming you have given them a “collective voice.”

Government is completely wrong.  It makes no sense.  Respecting people’s right to use their bodies and property (without which they are beholden to the mob any time they want to turn ideas into actions in the physical world), letting them act without being enslaved to their neighbors’ violent whims, does make sense. 

Don’t vote for collectivism, don’t protest in favor of collectivism, don’t sing songs of “unity” and “solidarity” that imply we are better off when forced to submit to the will of the mob instead of being free to interact voluntarily as we choose. 

If you’ve devoted your life to the collectivist cause, no doubt you’ve made well-meaning friends, faced some genuinely awful foes, and occasionally accomplished something good or at least relatively harmless.  But you were fundamentally wrong in your understanding of social reality, and you need to stop now before you destroy the world.  Rethink your life, rebuild your philosophy – from the ground up, as it were. 

And consider the individual.  To do otherwise is simply to give in to the bullying, sadistic impulse to force the will of the majority on those they outnumber.  You can call it democracy and congratulate yourself for being (for now) on the winning side of history.  But you’re wrong.  And I still believe you can change.