"Martin H. Greenberg & Mark Tier - Visions of Liberty" - читать интересную книгу автора (Greenberg Martin H)

your own happiness. Only the initiation of force can threaten your life. The greatest danger to your
freedom is not some foreign power—it is your own government. When Thomas Jefferson said "the price
of liberty is eternal vigilance," it was the government of the United States that he was warning his fellow
citizens to be vigilant against.
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The solution of America's founding fathers was to delineate and restrict the role of government. Via the
Constitution and the Bill of Rights they clearly (they thought) laid down what government could do, saying
that everything else was reserved to the people.

Unfortunately, the imperative of every human organization is to grow. Businesses grow by making more
sales and gaining market share; associations grow by signing up more members; governments grow by
expanding their power.

This never happens overnight; government grows by salami tactics, slice by slice. For example, when the
income tax was introduced in 1913 no one in his right mind would have suggested a top rate of 90
percent. In fact, there was considerable support for capping the income tax at 4 percent. This was shot
down by those who argued that specifying such a maximum rate would mean the income tax would
rapidly rise to that (then) horrific level. Can you imagine living in a world where an income tax of 4
percent is unthinkable!?

So the government of the United States has grown, slice by unnoticeable slice, till it bears scant
resemblance to the government at the country's birth.

Perhaps there is some other way to put a government's use of force into a straitjacket from which it
cannot escape. To the best of my knowledge, no one has ever come up with a convincing, workable
proposal along these lines.

As Ayn Rand put it inThe Fountainhead : "The only way in which we can have any law at all is to have
as little of it as possible. I see no ethical standard by which to measure the whole unethical concept of a
State, except in the amount of time, of thought, of money, of effort and obedience, which a society
extorts from its every member."1

If the initiation of force is unethical, then it logically follows that government, as we know it, is also
unethical. But that, of course, does not answer the question: Could a society without government actually
work? If it's hard to imagine a world in which a 4 percent income tax is unthinkable, it's much harder to
imagine how a governmentless society could avoid breaking out into a civil war, or simply degenerating
into chaos.

That's a common view; after all, the word "anarchy" is generally used to mean "chaos in the absence of
government." But that's to assume, mistakenly, that government is the source of law and order.

On January 24, 1848, the California gold rush began. But it took eighteen years for the U.S. Congress
to enact a mining law to regulate such discoveries. Meanwhile, gold production in California boomed.
How could that have happened without a governmental framework to recognize mining claims, register
titles, and regulate disputes?