Government disease

On Lew Rockwell, one of the writers compared government to a drug on the grounds that the more government we have the more people desire yet more government. With any normal product, people eventually get sated and fewer and fewer people desire to have greater and greater quantities of given goods.

On Liberty for All, one of the writers noted that the more chaos the government creates, the more people see it as the only way to avoid chaos, because without government there would be chaos.

Libertarians, whose political philosophy starts with trying to expand the rights of the individual and therefore have less government as a consequence, are accused of having a hatred of government as a starting point.

Whenever a libertarian exercises his right to try to improve the government by reducing the size and scope of the government, those who prefer larger government offer the spurious argument "move to Somalia", although curiously the argument that those who enjoy large government should move to Cuba is never considered. The argument "move to Somalia" is quite spurious since Somalia actually suffers from government just like other countries do - every time the Somalis start to rebuild some country sends in a "peacekeeping force" to destroy everything that was built up and try to impose a government that the Somalis don't recognize. Eventually the "peacekeeping force" leaves, the puppet government collapses, and the rebuilding resumes.

The perverse relationship some people have to the government is revealed in the healthcare debate. The current system in the United States is already largely a government system, as over half the dollars spent on healthcare are spent by the government, and the rest are heavily regulated. Given that state of affairs, and that the current system has serious flaws that are crying out for reform, the only proposals that are considered as part of the debate are those that advance the government. A public option is proposed to allegedly increase compeition, when allowing insurance companies to compete across state lines and forcing states to reconginze medical licenses from other states would actually do the job without increasing the size or scope of government. But when that is mentioned in debates proponents of government medicine fail to notice that it was mentioned. They do not argue against it, they do not say it is wrong, they do not say their plan is better. They simply do not respond to it at all.

There are so many ways in which the government is responsible for the current broken system that it would take many analysts reporting from many different angles to cover them all - the entire libertarian blogosphere. But those who are addicted to government will never see that their own addiction causes the very chaos that they want their drug to cure.