Written by Julian Modiano   

These days it seems that every political group is asking for something. Increased tariffs to stop companies from off-shoring. Increased regulation of abortion. More spending on education. More laws controlling the regulation of guns. The list goes on and on. Everyone wants the government to create a better society. And what are the government’s means? Force. If you don’t precisely follow their orders, which are obviously always issued with the explicit purpose of creating a better society, you get fined or jailed. If you try not paying a fine, you get jailed. And if you try not going to jail, you get shot.

People ask the government for all sorts of things, and usually it involves making other people do things they wouldn’t otherwise like to do. They become self-righteous, always feeling like they command the moral high ground. And so we have the hundreds of crusades, against gay marriage, against cuts in welfare spending, against cuts in the military budget, against private ownership of guns. All of these people, like thousands of children, compete for mummy’s – big government’s – attention. Hoping the government can solve their problems, and punish the siblings who don’t do what they want.

And what do I want? All I want is to be left alone. Is that really so much to ask? I’m not asking anything of anybody else. I couldn’t care less how many guns you own or how many people of what gender you marry. As long as you’re not forcing anybody to do anything they don’t want to do, it’s your business, in my opinion. Just leave me alone. I want to be able to enter into voluntary agreements with people, if I choose to do so, and on my own terms. If I’m looking for a job, I want to have the right to sign a contract stating that if I go on strike, I would be immediately fired. I’d rather sign one that said I could go on strike, but I want to be allowed to sign it if I want to. I want to be allowed to take a risk and eat something that hasn’t been labelled properly, without knowing what’s in it. As a vegetarian, I’d much rather it be labelled. But I want to have the freedom to choose for myself. I’d like to have the freedom to sign a tenancy agreement in which the landlord can evict me on a day’s notice. Again, I’d rather sign one that said I had to be told a month in advance – but since the former contract would most likely be cheaper, I’d like to have the freedom to pay less and take a risk.

You take a look around at society today and all you see is a mess. Everybody fighting over government power to impose their will on everybody else. Everyone convinced that they’re the only ones who have it right. Not realizing that governments exist to make laws, because if bureaucrats aren’t constantly passing laws then there would be no need for them to be employed as bureaucrats, a fact of which they must be at least subconsciously aware. And that therefore the more people complain, the happier they are, because the more laws they can pass. Therefore, the people who want to own guns find it increasingly harder, while the people who want to marry people of the same gender find that they can’t. Nobody’s happy. It’s a lose-lose situation. It stands to reason that if the government has the power to stop someone from owning a gun, it also has the power to stop you from smoking marijuana. Why would it pick one? Indeed, wouldn’t only picking one be discrimination?

What you need to realize is that a government with the power to do all the things you want it to do also has the power to do all the things you don’t want it to do. I don’t doubt that your intentions are excellent. You earnestly want what’s best for society. But so do millions of other people, and why should the government only listen to you? Like any good parent, it’s going to have to listen to everybody. Are you willing to sacrifice some of the things you love, which somebody else might deem dangerous to society, just so you can stop somebody else from doing something that you think is dangerous to society? Wouldn’t we all be better off if we left the government out of it and resolved our own problems? How about this: if you think gay marriage corrupts society, move to a community where gay people are not allowed. If you think that guns are dangerous, fine – create a community in which they’re banned. If you want to be paying taxes in order to have public roads, go ahead. There’s no reason you can’t have your cake and eat it to. If we’d all just learn to leave the government out of it, we’d realize that we could solve all of the problems we see in society much more effectively. We would all be living in a society shaped in our own image, instead of being forced to live in a society shaped by the whims of millions of people we don’t even know.