If you think government is useless, evil and unnecessary, ponder those pictures of looters in Iraq ransacking homes, hotels, even hospitals. Feel for that sobbing official of the National Museum of Antiquities, aghast at the destruction of irreplaceable historical artifacts by an angry mob.
This lesson is timely. On and about April 15, anti-government and anti-tax groups annually devote much energy to trying to convince Americans that we live under a rapacious, money-grabbing, rights-destroying regime. The anti-taxers always throw numbers about how many days and months you'll be "working for the government." It's their way of describing how much of your income is taken in taxes.
Yes, and how is that incorrect?
What these groups never talk about, because it would wreck their story line, is the extent to which our personal and collective prosperity as a property-owning, enterprising people depends on strong and effective government. No government, no property. No government, no security from looting, theft or violence. No government, no national defense. No government, no social stability. No government, no securities law. No government, no food inspections, no consumer and environmental protection, no safeguards for workplace rights, no social insurance.
These are liberal assumptions. I would love to know what "social insurance" is. Enterprising people don't need much government at all. My father spent more time trying to figure out a way to please an overbearing government than ordering products. Enterprising people need enough police presence to keep a crime area down, and decent roads for commerce, but Dad was hardly helped when the city decided to spend $30,000 on a sculpture to put in front of the courthouse. When he began a smaller business after retirement, the country inspector made him buy a new toilet bowl, because the one present wasn't big enough according to the government. You couldn't tell a difference by looking at the two, but if he didn't spend the $100 on a new toilet, he wasn't going to be allowed to open. And then when it was decided that he needed wheel chair ramps, he wondered if the reason he was going into business was to make money or to provide a government service to strangers. So Dad not only got taxed, he still had to provide the service himself. How is that helping enterprising people?
"Property rights are meaningful only if public authorities use coercion to exclude nonowners, who, in the abuses of law, might well trespass on property that owners wish to maintain as an inviolable sanctuary," Holmes and Sunstein write. Markets themselves could not function outside the law; "they function well only with reliable legislative and judicial assistance."
A lot of the things Dionne lists above are legitimate functions of government, but it shouldn't cost people half their income to get these things. A minimum amount of taxes should provide most of what we need. People can't always rely on the police and government. We have the right and responsibility to protect our property from looting and violence, ourselves. We forged this nation without a large central government. Pioneers didn't sit in Boston and complain that they couldn't go west until the police presence had reached those areas. The government is here at our disposal, not the other way around. It's too big and a tax cut and reduction in spending isn't going to cause looting and anarchy. God only asks for 10%, why should the government require any more than that?
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