Providing the next generation with the skills to survive and thrive is critically important. When governments take over education, young minds suffer. The exploitation of the education racket is particularly vicious because to miseducate or under-educate a child is to cripple their future. Young minds naturally absorb information and seek the skills most essential to their happiness and prosperity. Threatening young people with consequences to ensure obedience stifles free-thinking and teaches the way of government: to accept rule by force.
Governments have always had an incentive to warp young minds to serve their purposes. With the rise of complex societies, governments had the means to force children into classrooms in what is sometimes referred to as “cemetery seating.” It is an appropriate term, because coercive education kills a part of every child’s vibrant individuality. In the industrial age, governments needed obedient workers with a specific set of skills. Forced education indoctrinates children with government values. It is much easier to convince young people to join the military and kill strangers if they have been “taught” that this is glorious. Governments also benefit from being able to keep certain knowledge away from students.
When governments control education, people become more dependent on institutional jobs because they are less capable of living independently. A government that controls education will never teach us to stand up for our rights. A government that is responsible for the development of young minds will teach them what to think, not how to think. A government that can control what we know, and what we don’t know, can control what we do. Government schools will never teach an alternative to blind allegiance. The consequences of government education are far-reaching, profound, and compounded with each generation.
While government control over schools (whether by regulation or complete takeover) always hinders learning, it is important to see education as a much broader concept. Like a flower growing through a crack in a sidewalk, even someone whose schooling is thoroughly controlled cannot be prevented from flourishing. Especially now, with greater access to the internet, children are capable of educating themselves. In many places, parents are in a continuous revolt against forced education. Most want what is best for their children and seek alternatives like homeschooling, private schools, and various forms of self-guided learning. Parents who care too much to trust their children’s minds to government and children who learn more online than from the mental prisons of forced “education” are exploring such alternatives like never before. Young minds absorb information much better by the indulgence of their curiosities and stimulation of their passions than by force.
As an essential service that invokes strong emotions, medical care invites government meddling. Modern medicine has made incredible things possible, but many life-saving procedures remain very expensive. In the natural course of new technologies, prices start high and come down over time. Tragically, government regulation in rich countries has kept prices high so many life-saving technologies remain out of reach for people in poor countries. Efficiency is not just about economic productivity in terms of having more stuff. It also means saving lives.
Even if we had a nonviolent market for medical services, some advanced life-saving technologies would remain too expensive for most people. Fortunately, the nature of the need for these services presents a solution that the market readily provides: insurance. This means people who don’t need services right now can buy insurance and pool their resources. When they need an expensive service, the insurance company, which makes money by providing the service of pooling risk, pays for it. Of course this is not a perfect solution, but it is a very powerful way to give the poor access to treatment they might never be able to afford individually.
Unfortunately, many insurance corporations end up with the same special privileges as the best government sponsors. This leads to lower accountability to the consumer by limiting choices, often resulting in denial of coverage and hospital bills that bankrupt families. In some places, government has taken over the medical insurance industry as the sole provider. This may have an effect on helping the poorest of the poor temporarily, but eventually it hurts everyone by making care less accessible or by inefficiently diverting so many resources into the medical industry that other areas of the economy suffer.
We all want reassurance that the medical care we get is safe. This demand is enough to drive a lot of resources towards safety and consistency of care. Many governments exploit our fear of medical tragedy to take over this essential market function. They require licenses to provide treatment, approval to distribute drugs, and obedience to regulations for all the ways medical care is paid for. When governments require a license, they force people to meet their standards, which often stifles innovation. The standards are often meaningless, but because people trust government, they will accept treatment from anyone as long as they have government approval. That’s how most horror stories occur, rather than from people working without a license. Where governments control drug safety, the results are staggering: millions of people have died from government-approved drugs, and millions more have died while life-saving drugs were kept off the market. Government control of the medical industry has the same disastrous effects on prices, availability, safety, and customer satisfaction as in any other industry.
One of the noblest elements of our nature is our desire to help the less fortunate. As members of the human family, we want to see each other succeed. It hurts any compassionate person to see others suffer. Governments love taking advantage of this and when they have the capacity to steal from everyone and control the conversation with propaganda, it’s easy to convince people that they want to steal from the rich to give to the poor. In reality, most government welfare programs steal from the working class to give to the poor in a way that entrenches government so it can continue to steal from everyone to give to the super rich.
People support government welfare programs because they like the immediate effects. The problem is they don’t see the bigger picture and the hidden consequences. It is naïve to think we can simply elect politicians and trust them to address problems of poverty and wealth disparity. Governments have been the primary tools of creating wealth disparity. If we want to achieve a legitimate goal, using coercion will usually result in the opposite of what we want. The warped incentives of welfare lead to warped behavior like basing major decisions on qualifying for benefits. This is true of welfare programs that end up creating huge dependent classes of people who will always vote for more coercion. Welfare turns its recipients into government apologists who will promote a system that keeps them down because they think it’s in their best interest.
In the name of “fighting poverty,” governments create massive and complex bureaucracies that control housing resources and manipulate the labor market to force people into bad jobs. They spend stolen money on no-bid contracts for anything they can get us to believe will help the poor. If the people who genuinely care about helping the poor were directing those resources, they would be used far more effectively.
The realization that welfare programs are destructive presents another problem: how do we phase out these programs without pulling the rug out from underneath so many dependent people? The answer is quite simple: restore the power of local communities where people are affected. It might not be easy, but we will all be better off when peaceful solutions displace violent ones. It is also essential to remove economic barriers that stifle upward mobility and self-sufficiency, such as minimum wage laws, regulations that make it impossible to start a new business from nothing, or the laws that, in some places, make selling goods on the side of the road illegal.
Despite so much being taken by governments, most societies still have a great capacity to help the poor. There is nothing wrong with taking money from a government. Money spent on welfare is money that can’t be spent on violence. Nonviolent solutions are always more effective than violent ones. When we choose to help the poor, it is far more effective than governments taking our money “to give to the poor.” We can build the institutions and culture necessary to elevate the least among us without coercion. We can be compassionate without using force to help those in need.
People have used drugs to control their minds for as long as we have known how. We do this for many reasons, from recreational highs, to performance improvement, to increased sociability. In any case, only the owner of the mind in question should decide what goes in it. There is a human tendency to want to control the minds of those around us to ensure that no one in our community is a threat to others or isn’t working hard enough to support those around them. Governments take advantage of this with various policies, some of which are intended to make us more productive taxpayers, but all of which serve special interests. Prohibition of any substance is premised on the idea that your body is government property, and you do not have the right to decide what goes in it. Possession is never a crime.
The prohibition racket is very prominent in modern governments because there are many beneficiaries. In most places, alcohol is the dominant recreational drug and the industry behind it spends plenty of money keeping the competition away by paying off politicians who reinforce the false premises, faulty logic, immoral enforcement, and outright lies of prohibition. In the case of marijuana prohibition (as well as for numerous other natural drugs with healing properties), the pharmaceutical industry has an enormous incentive to keep cheaper (sometimes free) and more effective drugs illegal. Keeping drugs away from people who want them is an impossible and endless task that “requires” vast resources to be diverted to police and those who equip them. These groups all have an interest in supporting prohibition and many have no problem lying to the public or hiring politicians to do it for them.
Prohibition policies, once enacted, become entrenched very quickly, not just because of the financial incentives, but also because it is such an easy racket to maintain. People will always do drugs. Enforcement is a matter of what society will tolerate and the only real check is the conscience of the enforcers. Real crimes require victims, but prohibition is based on calling a victimless behavior a crime so that police have an excuse to sacrifice their morality. Once there is a critical mass of enforcers with socially-accepted enforcement policies, there is nothing to stop them from planting drugs on their victims, making it very easy to keep prohibition profitable.
One assumption of the drug war is that some drugs are illegal because they are dangerous or unhealthy. In other words, because doing drugs might ruin your life, if you’re caught with them, the government will ruin your life. In many places, most common drugs that aid productivity are allowed. If a drug is unpopular enough that it can be demonized, but widespread enough that banning it can be profitable, it will probably be made illegal.
To the extent that drug use is a legitimate problem, nothing makes it worse than charging in to point guns at everyone involved. This drives the market underground, creating new problems of violence and addiction. People who can’t control their use are less able to get help. It also drives up prices for the addict, encouraging financial destitution. Some will say prohibition is futile because it doesn’t achieve its stated objectives, and many governments can’t even keep drugs out of prisons. They are missing the point: prohibition works exactly as intended and is a very profitable racket.
There are no more precious resources for humanity than those essential to all life on earth. We all have a right to breathe the air, drink the water, take nourishment from the earth, and put to use all manner of natural resources, so long as we do not interfere with anyone else’s access to these resources. We are perfectly capable of protecting the environment, while respecting these rights, without resorting to government coercion. Using violence will often produce the opposite of the desired result, and in protecting the environment, using government has resulted in massive pollution, squandering of resources, and the destruction of countless lives.
When governments are trusted with the responsibility of protecting the environment, it does not change the nature of government. These protection rackets’ only incentive to protect the environment is to preserve their credibility in order to serve their special interests in more important ways. When they can, they will gladly sacrifice the environment to make the rich richer and the poor poorer. Even when their true intent is legitimate conservation, or the people so demand it that they are forced to try, these violent institutions are not very effective.
Governments cannot effectively protect the environment because in order to exist, they have to impose a warped view of property rights. Because governments exist to serve their sponsors and have monopolies on courts, their courts will almost never provide justice to individuals suffering from the effects of pollution. The policies of corporatism remove accountability at every level possible. This is especially true of “government-owned” land that is rented and severely damaged by people who have no legitimate ownership stake in it.
Because we all have the right to claim natural resources as our own by putting them to use, we have the right to claim land that is not being put to use. Governments depend on the ability to arbitrarily claim land and they extend that false right to their favored citizens. It is an essential human right to be able to claim a plot of land to make a home or to be productive. Already, under most governments, this is nearly impossible. Instead, people with money or the right connections are allowed put up fences (real and virtual) around massive plots of land. When people can use the land in accordance with their rights, the true landowners will have an interest in preserving its value. When we demand a proper respect for property rights, and a consistent standard of what constitutes fair use of environmental resources, we will put an end to the squandering and destruction encouraged by government.
The same fundamental principles apply to the preservation of rare species and other natural treasures. Making it illegal to kill endangered species means poachers will only have to get around a government. Giving people an ownership interest in the most valuable of resources, possibly a widely-distributed ownership, means anyone who would violate their property will have to defeat security commensurate with the value of those resources. Governments put corrupt people in charge of managing precious natural resources who will never be as capable of defending them as those who truly value them, and the experts who understand their value. People who have an interest in preserving rare species have an incentive to protect them. Turning to governments to protect endangered species is hoping we can cast a vote and forget about the problem. We are turning our backs on them when we entrust their future to such an ineffective system.
Climate change has become a favorite excuse for governments to tighten control over the energy industry. No matter how big a problem climate change may be, it does not justify more coercive control. Whatever challenges humanity faces, we will address them more effectively by cooperating. Governments are already experimenting with weather modification in ways that are harmful to the environment. Only because it is being pursued by governments is it possible with so little transparency and accountability.
Many environmental issues are large and complicated, so most people are eager to avoid responsibility and trust governments to maintain access to clean food, air, and water. But even the problem of air pollution can be attributed to government subsidization of the oil, gas, and auto industries, especially by paying for the roads. If the cost of pollution and roads were not removed from the price of driving, we would have a natural incentive to develop technologies that avoid those costs, or at least deal with them more efficiently. Governments remove many natural incentives to develop cleaner and more efficient technologies.
A free market system will provide for the optimal usage of natural resources and properly value them, from the least to the most precious. Owners make better guardians than renters and governments rob us all of our chance to take a responsible ownership stake in our planet. Through conscious consumerism, or by the usage of ostracism and boycott when necessary, we can all play a role in setting appropriate standards for the use of natural resources. Regardless of our personal views on what resources are important, turning to coercion to protect them will only serve the needs of government sponsors.
There is nothing more valuable than what we produce and hold in our minds. Every new idea is the product of many past innovators. We see further and invent more only because of those who propelled us forward not by hoarding their ideas, but by sharing them. For true creators of ideas, it is extremely arrogant to claim responsibility for new ideas beyond the insignificant contributions we have made to the innovation of all those who have gone before us. But governments all over the world have stepped in to appeal to the egos of intellectuals and artists alike to create the most arrogant racket of all: intellectual property. Preventing people from copying ideas keeps them from improving on them and severely impedes human progress.
In the development of new ideas or creative works, there is legitimate “intellectual property,” but only as a metaphor. By confusing this with real property, we invite the use of force against the free flow of ideas, and governments are happy to accept! This metaphor of intellectual property can be very important in the development of new ideas and in research and development. When ideas are held in secret through the exercise of property rights and contractual agreements, that is legitimate. When government force is used against ideas or data, that is a criminal violation of someone’s real property rights.
The concept of “intellectual property” as we know it today directly contradicts real property rights. If you own physical property, and want to copy music on your computer, write down something someone else said in a notebook, or carve a stone into a wheel, you don't owe anyone for the use of ideas that you have used your own real property to recreate. The creator of ideas can control how ideas are shared, but only once. After that, the only way to control the flow of ideas is to use the government to violate the real property rights of others.
The most offensive part about the intellectual property racket is how it shifts the focus from innovation to stopping innovation. In a true free market, which is by definition free of coercion-based intellectual property, (as the world had been for ages until relatively recently) the focus is on the next idea. If we want to compete and stay ahead, we have to be the most creative. That's what is rewarded. We wouldn't say the fashion industry lacks innovation because specific styles can’t be patented. Imagine a world in which the cut of a sleeve can’t be copied. Or the idea of pants! If only one company was allowed to make jeans and someone else tried, they could send police to shut down their operation. Or food! Imagine if chefs couldn't copy recipes!
In the media today, the ravages of IP are plain to see. Look at the consolidation of power in the music industry. How much better would our lives be if everyone who made music was making it for the love of innovation and what we heard wasn't decided by radio stations and record labels? Same with movies! We should not have so much power concentrated in the large corporations that come to dominate any field subject to the intellectual property racket. Taking away this corporatist advantage would radically improve creative innovation.
As for inventions that require massive development costs, the ideas should be allowed to go to those most efficiently capable of producing the goods people want to consume. For inventors, this would mean we can't come up with one idea, file a patent, then sit back and collect royalties. This would open the field up to everyone, make it more competitive. To make money as an inventor, we would have to be good enough that people would want to support our next idea, which is essentially what corporations do when they take the best minds into their labs and claim to own their ideas. Crowdfunding is one thriving alternative model. The same principles apply to software development. Working on code in the sequestered way dictated by “intellectual property” (as opposed to open source) means stifling collaboration.
In the case of the pharmaceutical and medical technology industries, the intellectual property racket has had disastrous consequences. Instead of developing drugs that best serve our needs and save lives, resources are diverted to developing drugs that make more money due to artificial incentives. Lives are lost because market forces are kept from bringing down the cost of new drugs.
The internet has removed so many barriers to sharing ideas that some business models based on the intellectual property racket can no longer compete with those based on free data. Without the need for physical distribution networks for music, video, and everything else that can be digitized, it is easy for anyone to compete as a content creator on the merit of their creative works. Content creators who want us to benefit from their work will encourage sharing.
Because it is morally wrong to use force to impede the free flow of ideas, as free people, we have the right to copy music, movies, text, and ideas. Because the free flow of ideas is essential to human progress and happiness, we also have a right to defy and resist any attempt to take our real property in the name of the dangerous fiction commonly referred to as "intellectual property."