Government Is People

Whenever we see a proposal for this new regulation, that new government agency, or that other brilliant new law, I always look at it from a slightly different point of view than most. Many people, especially those of a liberal bent, will tell you that government must protect us from many things, such as poverty, sickness, and even each other. Personally, I don’t believe that our governments do so great a job on that score, but (the argument goes) to do that they need power.

Why don’t I trust government with power? Because a government is not a solid entity that is supernaturally imbued with an altruistic concern for my welfare. Government is composed of people. That’s right, government is made up of people not so different from you or I. They love, they laugh, they hate, and they cause harm… just like ordinary people everywhere.

When we grant a new power to government, for example, the power to supply us with health care (I’m referring here to a single-payer, or government-run health care system), we are giving that power over our lives to other people. “Take care of me” we are saying to them. And usually, those people in government are all too glad to comply… though not always as we had imagined they would.

You see, being in government, either as an elected official or as a government employee, gives them power they wouldn’t otherwise have. And when I say power, I mean the only kind of power that matters to some people… power over the lives of other people. When we give power to government, we are actually giving that power to the people who are working there.


Power abhors a vacuum, and the very people most drawn to power are those most likely to abuse it. So the more power we give to government, to the people employed therein or elected to office, the more likely that power will be abused. And by abused, I mean used in a manner not originally intended to either further the interests of the individual(s) involved or to harm other (usually non-governmental) people.

When we grant government the power, for example, to use machines to peek under our clothing, we are in fact granting that power to the individuals hired to work security in airports. Some will abuse that power and, no matter what the rhetoric you hear today, some TSA worker somewhere will post those pictures on the internet. It will happen, for the simple reason that those involved are ordinary people with all the foibles and imperfections that implies. Many or most may be honest, but all will not be.

The “government is good” concept requires us to believe that COLLECTIVELY all those people will “first do no harm,” even though we know that people make mistakes and people aren’t always good. I know this is so, and I know that simply becoming part of “government” doesn’t transform somebody into a good person who won’t abuse his authority. Whether it’s IRS workers looking at celebrity tax records they weren’t supposed to, airport screeners forcing mothers to drink their own breast milk to prove it wasn’t explosives, or the FBI lying about emergency terrorism cases to illegally obtain phone records, power given to government will eventually be misused… to our sorrow.

Therefore, it is essential that we are careful and cautious about WHAT powers we give to our government. And if they don’t legally have a power that they exercise anyway, it is our responsibility to fight that usurpation of power.

When government asks for a new power, we should ALWAYS investigate their claims of how “necessary” that power is. I have contended from the start that the Patriot Act made it easier to search homes, phone records, and the like… and that the power wasn’t necessary. That it might make some jobs easier wasn’t an issue, but it certainly wasn’t NECESSARY to fight terrorism… though the government (naturally) claimed that it was. And nobody can honestly argue that the power has NOT been abused… see the link above about the FBI doing precisely that.

I do not blindly trust complete strangers, and so I do not blindly trust in the benign nature of government. Why? Because government isn't just government, it's people.