The Reactionary Utopian - May 2,2006

WHY DO WE NEED GOVERNMENT?

by Joe Sobran About twenty years ago a very intelligent man, whom I'11 call Robert (he's acfually a sort of composite of several men), told me he was an anarchist. He didn't believe in any govemment, period.

At the time I considered myself a conservative, with libertarian leanings. Much I respected Robert, I believed in limited government under the U.S. Constitution -- but none at all? That was taking a good idea too far, I thought.

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Notice the illogic of my reaction. I was thinking of a philosophy as a matter of personal taste, as if you could draw an arbifrary line and stop there. uWould you prefer a little bit of government, a moderate amount, or a lot of it?"

After a while (years, actually) it sank in that Robert wasn't just telling me what "quantity''of government he'd prefer. He was saylng that the whole idea of it was wrong in principle -- no matter whether it was democratic, Communist, monarchist, Christian, or something else. He would agree that some are worse than others, but he insisted that all were wrong. Any government is a monopoly of organizeAforce, inherently unjustifiable; and once accqlted, it's bound to get out of control sooner or later.
This notion is hard for Americans to Sasp, let alone assent to. After all, we have what looks like a solid rationale for government in our Declaration of Independence, plus a practical plan for keeping it within due limits in our Constitution and Bill of Rights. True, American government has become a staggering tangle of laws, powers, regulations, and taxes, with recurrent wars, public debt, debased money, and countless other evils, but couldn't this be cured by retuming to the Constitution?
That's what I used to think. Besides, what would we replace the government with? Who would protect us from violent crime and foreign enemies? Who would coin the money? Who would pave the streets and fix the potholes? Others would ask who would feed the destitute, care for the sick and elderly, protect minorities, and cope with myriad other crises, emergencies, and easily imaginable disasters -- most of which, by the way didn't use to be thought of as responsibilities of government. Everyone has a horrible fantasy that makes the actual horror seem (to him) worth putting up with.
Read the label on a can of soup, and think how many laws and regulations the vendor has to comply with. The rationale for these is that the public has to be protected from what? Unhealthy ingredients of some sort, I suppose. But would we really be in any peril if there were no government enforcing these costly restrictions? Would it be in the seller's interest to poison his custometrs, even if there were no legal penalty for doing so? How often did that happen before all these laws were imposed? Roadside fruit stands are still unregulated. Are these dangers to the purchaser?