Thinking Outside the Aquarium: A Different View of Government Force

Much like a fish in a small aquarium, the citizens of modern-day nations have a distorted view of the world around them, and their relative freedom. They’ve never known a space any larger than the walls of their fish tank. From their perspective, the aquarium constitutes the limits of their world, and it is the only life that they can imagine.

I’m penning this essay to encourage my readers to take a step back and think about the very nature of government — all governments, at all levels. Of the 195 nations on Earth, all but a few have many common characteristics. And to the inhabitants of the vast majority of nations can only conceive of life within the constraints imposed upon them by their respective governments.

In essence, governments are like organized crime gangs, that go around collecting “protection” money. They are simply better organized, have larger and more organized force backing them up, and have a facade of legitmacy. But in the end, they are still mafia-like gangs, albeit with cops, courts, and fancy flags.

Imagine a gang that is so large and so well-entrenched that it begins to dictate how people live, where they can go, and what they can buy or sell. It spies on all of their activities, tracks their movements, and listens in on their conversations. The gang issues a currency that they can inflate at will. The gang’s regulations become voluminous and increasingly labyrinthine, dictating that even hair stylists must buy a license. Eventually, more than 20 percent of all income gets taxed and then passes through government agencies. And then the gang decides that only gang members or their bodyguards should have guns. They say this is “just commonsense gun safety regulation.”

Modern governments, worldwide, have common factors, whether they be a Democracy, Aristocracy, Oligarchy, or Dictatorship. All national governments share a common set of goals and tools. These include:

A strictly-enforced system of taxation.
A web of regulations.
A monopoly of the legal use of force (violence).
Self-perpetuation.
Secure borders.
Protecting the privileges of a few powerful individuals.
Rewards for those who “go along” with the system. (Tax incentives, grants, subsidies, et cetera.)
Treaties with other nations.
Legislatures, courts, police forces, and military organizations.

In my novel Land of Promise, I posited the establishment of a nation with a truly limited government. This government came very close to being no government, with the behavior of citizens constrained simply by the social norms of a populace that shares a common religious framework. In the case of the fictitious Ilemi Republic, that framework was Christianity. The only exercise of force came from a citizen’s militia, raised to defend the nation’s borders from invasion. Otherwise, the citizenry was left alone, to govern themselves. I intended Land of Promise to be gedankenexperiment. I wanted to use it to illustrate just how over-governed we have become, in 21st Century western nations.

You certainly won’t see governments described as gang-like in mainstream media outlets. Why? Because the media is a complicitous part of the problem:

“Democracy has become a weapon of moneyed interests. It uses the media to create the illusion that there is consent from the governed. The press today is an army with carefully organized weapons, the journalists its officers, the readers its soldiers. The reader neither knows nor is supposed to know the purposes for which he is used and the role he is to play. The notion of democracy is often no different than living under a plutocracy or government by wealthy elites.” – Oswald Spengler

The Crux Of It

For many years, I thought that the solution to our nation’s problems would come by simply reducing the size of government with constrained budgets and with term limits. However, the dilemma is that once they are in place, governments are just about ungovernable. They take on a life of their own, and inexorably expand their power. They soon reach into every aspect of life in all modern societies. And most politicians seem to be corrupt even before they reach high office. So term limits are only marginally effective.

My friend Bil Buppert has often chided me for clinging to the notion that governments can be limited. Perhaps he is right, in espousing the goal of Zero Government.

Our founding fathers thought that they had lit a small, cozy campfire of a government. But it has grown into a raging inferno that is consuming every bit of available fuel in the forest.