The World's Greatest Idea by John Farndon

Author:John Farndon
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: science, literature, history, medicine, politics, the arts, craft, language, food and drink, invention, internet, property, banking, justice, education
Publisher: Icon Books
Published: 2010-02-01T16:00:00+00:00

#26 Government

In 1791, the great libertarian campaigner Thomas Paine wrote in The Rights of Man that ‘society is a blessing, but government is evil’. In his typically robust fashion, Paine argued that governments bring nothing but harm. Ordinary men can live quite happily together without government, he felt. Governments were essentially criminal. ‘If we would delineate human nature with a baseness of heart, and hypocrisy of countenance, that reflection would shudder at and humanity disown,’ Paine fulminated. ‘It is kings, courts, and cabinets that must sit for the portrait.’

Paine was writing at the time of the American and French Revolutions, and he argued that America had managed to live for two years without any form of government at all, without society collapsing into chaos. Take away government and people’s natural adaptability comes to the fore and they organise things quite well for themselves.

The founders of the American constitution did not agree with Paine, however much they admired him. They felt that government was necessary. James Madison, often called the Father of the US Constitution, later replied to Paine’s assertion in this vein: ‘It has been said that all Government is an evil. It would be more proper to say that the necessity of any Government is a misfortune. This necessity however exists; and the problem to be solved is, not what form of Government is perfect, but which of the forms is least imperfect.’

Anarchists, however, have continued to argue that people would live much better without government. It would not, they argue, descend into what is colloquially called anarchy because people’s self-interest, even if not their communal spirit, would soon mean that mutual support networks would be set up. Unfortunately, it is almost impossible to imagine their ideas ever being really tried out.

Nowhere in the world do people live without government, and every time governments have collapsed, such as after the French, Russian and Chinese revolutions, the chaos has been so frightening that many people almost welcomed the brutal regimes that stepped in to take charge. More recently, the financial disarray that followed the fall of the Soviet Union meant that most Russians sighed with relief when Vladimir Putin asserted control. Similarly, the continuing turmoil in Iraq has made some Iraqis look back almost nostalgically on the time of Saddam Hussein, when, at least, the lights worked and the streets were safe. For most people, even bad government is better than no government at all because it provides the basic necessities of life.

It is sometimes said that government is a necessary evil because people are essentially selfish and so, without government, would descend into the terrible dog-eat-dog world described by seventeenth-century philosopher Thomas Hobbes as the ‘war of all against all’. Anarchists would rightly challenge this argument. First of all, there can be no such thing as a ‘necessary evil’. If it is evil, it is unnecessary; and if it is necessary, it cannot be evil. Secondly, there is no convincing evidence to show that people are so madly out of control that without government to rein them in, they would be at each others’ throats.

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