I have concluded that limited government is impossible. Once you give a government a monopoly over the use of force and the dispensation of justice as well as the ability to tax, it will always and everywhere grow beyond the limits originally set for it. The American Experiment is proof positive of this. The United States was set up to be a government whose sole purpose was to protect the rights and liberties of its citizenry. It was established by educated, worldly men who knew full well the dangers of government and its mechanisms (especially central banking), who did their best to agree on a government that would serve its people and break the pattern of privilege that characterized all modern states (if not all states) before it. They conducted this experiment in the Age of Enlightenment in a land that did not have a pre-existing central government and was, for these purposes, a clean slate. No more perfect experiment of establishing a just and self-limiting government could, has or will ever be conducted. It was tried and failed. For this reason, I believe the answer is in competitive government–that is, private law enforced by competing entities that you can opt out of. I don’t believe there is any service that cannot be provided privately, including national defense, and I believe natural law is self-evident: Don’t touch me or my stuff. All other laws are a violation of this law and represent government-bestowed privilege, which is itself, I believe, the true purpose of the modern state.
Because I believe that the sole purpose of the modern state is to bestow privilege, I believe that any effort for wholesale reform of the tax code is doomed to failure. As this documentary, An Inconvenient Tax, makes quite clear, the tax code is used first and foremost to bestow privileges, specifically to give tax breaks Continue reading…
