Government Is Destroying Society

Monty Pelerin / EconomicNoise.com

Civilization is fragile. It can be destroyed from within by merely forgetting what seemingly unimportant but necessary condtions. Like economics, society cannot be managed from the top down. It is dependent upon relationships among individuals and these are dependent upon rules or incentives.

I usually emphasize property rights and the Rule of Law as foundations for a civilized society. Naturally, freedom is assumed. Others use different terms, but they essentially point to the same things. Richard Mayberry, noted investment adviser, expresses his conditions less formally but equally meaningfully:

 In my book, Whatever Happened to Justice?, in a few of the other Uncle Eric books and in my newsletter, I often point out that the two fundamental laws that make civilization possible are 1) Do all you have agreed to do and 2) Do not encroach on other persons or their property. The first is the basis of contract law, and the second is the basis of tort law and some criminal law. If you have a population that’s dedicated to these laws, and the laws are widely obeyed, then you can have a very ethical civilization, one that moves forward very quickly.

If, however, you have somebody or some large group of people who are violating those laws, then that civilization can’t operate very well and it begins to decline. We see this all over the world. When legal systems are mutated to be tools of government policy rather than tools for producing a peaceful society, then it all goes to wrack and ruin. And this is repeated over and over again, throughout history.

I come back to that all the time. America has drifted entirely away from those two laws. Most Americans have never heard of them. Those laws were extracted from the British common law, which goes back to the Middle Ages. It used to be that in the schools the children were taught common law. In fact, at the time of the American Revolution, the common law was American history. If two Americans were talking about history they would be talking about common law. Most Americans today don’t have the foggiest idea what common law was, and civilization is in a downhill slide because it can’t go any other direction without those two laws.

You might want to read his full interview at the Daily Bell. It may open some eyes to a different view of the world.

We are at a point where our government is destroying the bonds of civilization. If they continue their attack on property rights and the Rule of Law, society is going to become very uncivil. It will make life “nasty brutish and short.”

When people are better than their government, they must either restrain their government or turn upon themselves as a result of their government.

http://www.economicnoise.com/2013/04/08/government-is-destroying-society/