How Bad Can the State Get?

The State has to be one of mankind’s most dysfunctional inventions. Every person on this planet should know this and accept it. The evidence of how bad states are is everywhere and overwhelming. A sample follows.

Only the state would re-interpret its constitution out of existence.

Only the state will systematically undermine the productivity and property rights of its own people.

Only the state will systematically undermine education within its borders.

Only the state will be corrupted by special interest groups.

Only will states institute mass drafts of their people into their military forces and proceed to use them as cannon fodder.

Under the state system, the world has seen unbelievable wars like the two world wars.

The state system has produced totalitarian regimes again and again and again.

States have repeatedly engaged in genocides.

Only states have devised wars on drugs that imprison people, corrupt policing, corrupt the justice system, encourage criminal gangs and, in the bargain, fail to achieve their goal.

Only the state could devise a war on terror that, like the war on drugs, expensively fails and produces more terrorists than ever before.

Only the state would forward deploy 7,000 tactical nuclear weapons in Europe.

Only the state would make the Davy Crockett nuclear mortar, a weapon with such a short range that it is highly dangerous to the infantry units that would fire it.

Only the state (the U.S. in this case) could spend $9 trillion on nuclear weapons, building out more than 70,000 nuclear warheads at the peak. Russia has 319 cities with population over 50,000.

Only the state would trash a perfectly sound free market health care system and replace it with socialized medicine.

Only the state will quixotically attempt to insure old age and employment or rather claim that it is.

Only the state will subvert working energy markets and replace them by costly energy regulations.

Only the state would trash sound free market money and replace it with inflationary money.

Only the state would militarize what once were relatively friendly local police under local control.

Only the state will destroy its own economy by adopting wrong-headed Keynesian economic policies.

Only the state would seek out and enter wars that can’t be won, that have no good objectives, and that are low-value to boot, such as in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan.

Only the state will destroy half its own country and people for the sake of maintaining its territory.

The state again and again and again enacts and carries out completely irrational policies. There was never a good reason to produce and deploy 70,000 nuclear warheads. There was never a good reason for the War on Drugs or for the War on Terror.

These examples of irrationality are not isolated. They are systematic. They arise because of the state system. They arise because the state has its powers and uses them in unaccountable ways, driven by special interests. Every irrational policy, irrational for the general public, is enacted because it’s rational for some special interests who gain by it. The state is machinery for the benefit of special interests. The waste is unimaginably large. The state could spend a trillion dollars that produces one-tenth of that amount as profit to some special interest. Those who are being taxed see this as entirely irrational. It would be cheaper to have no government and simply pay extortion money than to have to do it through the mechanism of the state.

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11:56 am on November 24, 2014