Is the polio vaccine a good thing?  Most of us with any familiarity with the ravages polio inflicted on generations past would answer that question with an immediate and enthusiastic “yes.”  Still, the world would be a far better place if there was no polio and, thus, no polio vaccines.  The injection into our bodies of foreign substances to create immunities to disease is good only because the action is juxtaposed against the far worse pain and suffering of polio itself.   None of us wish to receive a daily injection if none is called for.  In fact, we wish to receive as few injections – and not one more – as is necessary to stay healthy.  The polio vaccine is, in fact, a necessary evil.

Government is, and should be seen as, much the same.  In a perfect world, there would be no need for government.  We would be born free, live our lives free and die free without being dominated by others.  Sadly, the human condition precludes this.  Human beings are, by and large, selfish depraved creatures who will raid, kill and steal from each other and, throughout history, have.  This has caused humans to band into villages, tribes, kingdoms and nation states for mutual protection from attacks from others.  This is the basis for the social compact that is government.   As in the case of the polio vaccine, it would be a better world were government unnecessary.  That world does not exist so we have government.

The government of today, however, has gone far beyond the entreaties of the Founders to “establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.”  It has become a massive Leviathan that, through millions of pages of laws, hundreds of thousands of pages of tax law, millions of swarming bureaucrats, has worked its way into the most basic and intimate aspect of every citizens’ life.

Thomas Jefferson wrote that “Experience has shown that, even under the best forms of government, those entrusted with power have, in time and in operations, perverted it into tyranny.”  Sadly, our current government has been thus perverted.  The tyranny of the Leviathan that is the United States government is not that of the jackboot, but a soft tyranny described by Alexis de Tocqueville in Democracy in America:

It covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided; men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.

Today we are soothed by celebrity politicians who are securing huge fortunes as public servants who assure us that happiness and self actualization can be attained only by handing over increasing shares of our property, wealth and freedoms to them to manage on our behalf.   They will smooth off the rough edges of life, pad the hard corners of existence and make life better while we are allowed to pursue a dignified life devoid of care or worries.  In other words, we are a flock of timid and industrious animals asking for a little more veterinary care – please – from our shepherd.

There isn’t a single member of Obama’s cabinet who has ever started or run a business, met a payroll, created and marketed a product created wealth.  They are lawyers, teachers, military members and career bureaucrats.   In other words, they are people who have lived their lives in the expense column funded by those who actually create the wealth that is the source of our comfort, health, welfare and ease.  These are the masters we have elected to hold our leashes. Thees are the shepherds of administrative despotism.  In these masters and their cohorts in the Leviathan, we have concentrated all the powers of massive, intrusive government.  We tell ourselves that they answer to us but this is the self-imposed delusion of democratic despotism: we have submitted, and will continue to submit, to daily injections of soft tyranny.

Share on Facebook