Government Is Like….
13th November 2011
The thing is, a government is like a rifle: there are certain tasks for which no other tool will do. There are certain tasks you can do with other tools, but the rifle does them better if used with care, so using it is wise. But there’s a world of tasks out there that it’s terrible for, and trying to use it for those purposes will end up breaking the thing you want to fix and catching your neighbors in the stray fire. So you keep careful track of where you point the thing, and keep your finger off the damn trigger.
So I don’t hate government any more than I hate rifles, but I respect the damage both can do, and insist on keeping strict muzzle and trigger discipline. When you’ve built a government with a hundred-thousand employee strong bureau dedicated to regulating every aspect of agriculture and food, with an attitude of such pervasive, granular control that it thinks nothing of creating a “Christmas Tree Checkoff Task Force” to “strengthen the position of fresh cut Christmas trees in the marketplace and maintain and expand markets for Christmas trees within the United States”, you’re waving your damn rifle around with your booger-hook on the bang-switch, and other people on the firing line are right to be concerned.
Extending the analogy, there are people in the world who long to get control of the government because that way they can have things done their way, just as the guy with the rifle will often think that it makes him the boss. But simply being the boss doesn’t make you the smartest guy in the room, it just makes you the most powerful, which is why we need some serious controls on the people with rifles (government).
And the rifle makes a good synecdoche, as well, because the essential function of government is the sort of thing best done with rifles, i.e. defending people against thieves and murderers, both domestic and foreign. Once you get beyond that and use rifles for other purposes, such as forcing people to Do Things Your Way, you’re getting into Opression Territory, and you need to learn not to go there.
And there are other problems as well, per Freeberg:
There’s unfortunately even more to add on. Government does not fire at a target, miss, and try again. Every time the weapon is discharged, what our government is doing is “legislating” that a round will be fired at such-and-such a direction every year from now until the end of time. In other words, if another bullet is fired in some different direction, with the intent of hitting exactly the same target, and that one is a hit, our government doesn’t have the inclination or the incentive or the track record of going back and saying “Okay, the target is over there…so that legislation obliging us to fire in this direction, to hit that target, is wrong. No need to argue this point, it’s an established fact. We need to repeal that legislation and stop firing over here.” Can’t do that. Because the bad legislation is “law,” you see. It’s also a jobs program.