Come and Learn the Inner Workings of Government! See those gears there? Can you fit your head in there?

March 7th, 2011

One of the big debates libertarians like to engage in is whether our rulers are evil or dumb.  How planned is government evil?  Does it derive from the sloppy corruption of public choice economics or is it more orchestrated than that?  Like anything in life I doubt its as clear as choosing between the conspiracy versus incentives binary but the above picture gives us an interesting tableau.  The creator of this picture wants the viewer to imagine the American state as a well-oiled machine of legitimate democracy.

If we take this picture’s description of the government operation at face value, what goal precisely is the state efficient at?  What is the state’s actual goal?  To what end are the gears grinding?

The answers we’re used to are the sort of vague civics class platitudes that we’ve all come to facepalm over. “Government of the people, for the people, and by the people,” and “government by consent” sound nice and everything but reality is far more grim. When have we seen government actually working for regular people?  The state has always been a tool for the elite to set up exploitative conditions for the rest of us, with central banking being a case in point.  Sure, we may now and again be thrown a bone, something to appease us lowly proles, but the government’s gears in general are machinations against us and are almost never in our interests.

Thomas Jefferson famously declared that “the natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground.” Virtually every gear of the state which turns is another way in which our lives are managed from the top down by a nominally-democratic system; corralling us into an artificial and disastrous economy.

At this goal the government has been very successful.  At responding to suffering people and respecting our liberty?  Infinitely less so.  The gears turn for the elite but they omitted that part from the pretty picture.  Can’t say I blame them.  The truth is an ugly shade on the state.


About the Author: Ross Kenyon

Ross Kenyon is a Center for a Stateless Society Research Assistant currently living and studying in Istanbul, Turkey. He was a member of the Arizona State University Students For Liberty leadership team, and has recently started his own organization, Mutual Aid on the High Seas, devoted to sailing to impoverished communities in the Caribbean, performing humanitarian aid and promoting dialogue about liberty as an emancipatory philosophy for working people. On top of all of that, Ross will be joining us on Silver Underground as a contributor. Subscribe and follow his clever jabs and thoughtful reviews on news!