More Water Cooler Statism

I have decided that my state loving conspecifics are insane. Yesterday, we got into a pretty decent discussion about how the concept of limited government had fallen by the wayside and how the debate today was all about whether governments “should” do things rather than whether they “could” do things. I argued that, notwithstanding the general consensus that government was all powerful, I was going to continue to advocate for limited government or no government at all. This led one of the humans to declare that I was a “primitivist” since without government there would be no large-scale enterprises and no industrialization. America would never have been settled without governments’ taking the lead.

I hate these arguments about would or would not have happened if something different had happened in history, especially when they are stated as some sort of certainty. I usually reply with a “Says You!” and leave it at that. This time, I hastened to point out that the Americas had been settled for millennia without any apparent government action to encourage it. I doubt very seriously that proto-states organized the migrations across the Bering land bridge or over the North Atlantic ice sheet.

And government took over and controlled European settlement only when it became feasible to do so and when private individuals or organizations might very well have set off on their own (anyone ever heard of the Pilgrims?). Government wanted its cut and to assume the right to control land titles, but I don’t think that it generated the interest in the New World. I have no reason to believe that Europeans would not have settled in America without government aid or interference. In fact, I have long thought that it was government interference, through monopolies and restrictions on trade and control of land, that delayed settlement and development rather than encouraging it.

As to large-scale enterprises, who can say what forms of organization might develop if central planners did not decide that the corporate form was the way to go. I reckon that we would have plenty of large-scale undertakings but that the capital to finance them would not be in the control of a handful of men. Rather, capital and control would be spread out among many more people and organizations with different systems for accountability than we see now (which is basically no accountability at all). Are accountability and large-scale enterprises incompatible? I think not.

These are not unusual arguments from statists. The insanity is recognizable when you learn that the foregoing discussion arose out of my arguing that a local government’s provision of free tennis lessons to youth was symptomatic of how far we had gone from the idea of limited government. Tennis lessons are good; therefore, of course the government should provide them and fund and organize them through coercion. Would my conspecific have robbed her neighbor at gunpoint to pay for her tennis lessons? Of course not. Would she have a gang of thugs extract money from her neighbors with the threat of violence to pay for her lessons? That is precisely what she did, although she doesn’t want to look at it that way. Evidently, if her defender’s arguments about government as the creator of all progress throughout history are to make sense in this context, without government we would not have tennis lessons for middle class youth.