Don't Play Their Games

by Johan R:son Sjöberg
4/16/2004

So you say you're tired of government and all its stupidity? You say you don't like its arbitrary rules, regulations, prohibitions, tariffs, controls, et cetera? You say you don't know what to do to get rid of it?

I've got some good and some bad news for you. I'll start with the bad one: you're not getting rid of government overnight. That won't happen. I'm really sorry, but that's just the way it is.

Now, the good news. Government won't survive in the long run. It will implode, just like the Soviet Union did. It didn't implode because Reagan told it to go away, but because the system couldn't survive. The rules were absurd, perverse, impossible to live by. Socialism and central planning distorted the economy in major ways, creating big deficits of necessary goods and services (and surpluses of some other, like shoes). Black markets were common in the entire Eastern Bloc. In Soviet Russia, government-employed taxi drivers were cruising the streets of Moscow and St. Petersburg at night, looking for western tourists to drive, for US dollars and Deutchmarks. Government employees at plants in Ukraine stole light bulbs from their workplaces, and replaced them with burned out bulbs from home. That's why the Eastern Bloc imploded. People started living by their own rules, instead of by government's rules.

If you're not already a market anarchist, or at least libertarian of some kind, you may wonder what the implosion of the Soviet Union has to do with modern welfare states such as the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom and those in Western Europe?

To continue reading, click here.

-----
Got comments? Email me, dammit!