The Way Forward?
Politically, I have always sided with classical liberalism, the idea that the role of government should be limited to protection of an individual’s life, privacy and property, from outside aggression and its corollary of free speech — and that’s it: all other transactions can best be handled in a free market. Thus, freedom in a political context means the absence of coercion by government, and since they have a legal monopoly on coercion, their only purpose for its use is to protect an individual from physical aggression. In other words, government must never initiate force — only use it to defend its citizens.
And I believe that if government had constrained itself to that function only, we would not be in the societal mess that we are now experiencing — mass surveillance, immoral mandates, healthcare crisis where people now have to experience the anxiety associated with cancelled and delayed surgeries, group polarization, and the economic dystopia that awaits us as a result of the money supply expansion to finance government overreach. As I have written, historical evidence leads one to conclude that centralized democracies do not work well in the long run, and now with increasingly sophisticated technology at their disposal, democratic governments are rapidly morphing into being authoritarian, and even tyrannical at times.
The question I have difficulty answering is: Even if we could downsize government such that it used its legal monopoly on coercion, only to defend its citizens from physical aggression and never to initiate force, but then used the democratic process to elect the “administrative mangers’ of this government function, what would inhibit function creep as in every jurisdiction on the globe and across history?
Even though some may scream at me — large centralized democracies have never worked well. Just look at the current state of the world, notwithstanding Churchill’s comment that it is the worst political system, except for all the others. The pandemic did not cause this, the foundations of authoritarianism had already been laid by the electoral process.
I believe we must do something now because the status quo will further destroy our once beautiful culture of freedom with its creativity and innovation that benefits the masses and not enslave them; and prosperity, where no one is left behind.
As I have been writing, we have to transform government from a centralized domineering structure to one that is decentralized and actualizing. In my view, that means organizing and governing ourselves into smaller communities. But how do we get there from here? Regrettably, I do not have the solution. This is where we really do need the “Wisdom of the Crowd!” — Ann