Society's Greatest Asset is its People
Governments destroy wealth. It’s what they do. This is why it is always mildly amusing (and sad) to watch people protest for the reduction or elimination of “Waste, Fraud and Abuse.” These three things are a permanent feature of government. They will grow or shrink in direct proportion to the size of government. The people who spend their time trying to get governments to stop buying $16 muffins are missing the point entirely. It is not possible to remove waste, fraud and abuse. And it isn’t because the government needs your money to pay for all the great stuff they do for you. As Milton Friedman has said:
“In the long run government will spend whatever the tax system will raise, plus as much more as it can get away with.”
Of course, some of this is diverted into their own pockets, but the graft isn’t even the most important part for them. Sure, politicians and bureaucrats love it when they can siphon off a few hundred thousand dollars here and there, but the most important thing is that the wealth is destroyed. Private wealth is the single biggest threat to governments. They will do anything within their power to destroy as much of it as possible. But it is very inefficient to just tax people, however wasteful they are with the proceeds. Entire bureaucracies must be created and it takes many patient years for people to accept ever higher tax rates and the acceptance of higher taxes is always slower than the need to extract ever more wealth. Keynesian stimulus measures may be very effective at destroying vast sums of wealth quickly, but they become increasingly hard to justify to a public that is constantly being burned by them. Naturally, militarism provides the answer. Killing people is the most efficient way to destroy untold amounts of wealth very quickly. Through killing, governments not only destroy all that a man has, they have also destroyed all that would have been. But governments do not at first kill their own people outright. They must condition their people for this, just as they must condition them to ever higher tax rates. The first step is to engage in foreign wars. They have the dual advantages of killing only a few citizens and of being extremely expensive. All governments will engage in war if possible. War also creates many opportunities for the State to seize ever increasing power. War, as Randolph Bourne has warned, is the “health of the state.” As Tom Clancy once said in an interview on Kudlow and Cramer on 9/2/03:
“What the government is good at is collecting taxes, taking away your freedoms and killing people. It’s not good at much else.”
Eventually, even this type of wealth destruction proves too slow and it is only a matter of time before all governments will turn to the direct destruction of the most valuable asset that society possesses — its own people. The reasons may ostensibly be to eradicate a perceived threat to power, but ultimately the fact remains that all current and future wealth of those killed is also destroyed or seized (an outcome which the State has surely not overlooked). Slaughter then becomes the new stimulus. R. J. Rummel termed this Democide, and noted in Death by Government:
“as the arbitrary power of a regime increases, that is, as we move from democratic through authoritarian to totalitarian regimes, the amount of killing jumps by huge multiples.”
