5. Government is Conflict

The essence of government is conflict. While trade is an activity that occurs between two or more parties that are acting voluntarily, government is an activity that depends upon force to coerce parties who are not acting voluntarily. Government, as necessary as it might be as a limited entity, is based upon the principle that it is in a state of conflict with its citizens and will use force or the threat of force to repress their voluntary behavior. Regardless of their proclaimed good intentions, people who support the expansion of government authority want to increase the amount of coercion and force against their fellow citizens.

The ultimate problem of government is man’s drive to repress his fellowman. Why does a man want to increase the amount of conflict that his neighbors must endure in a world already beset by strife? Why does a person want to limit the amount of voluntary cooperation that occurs in the marketplace and increase the amount of involuntary coercion that characterizes the police state?

Man represses his fellowman because he has already repressed himself. Facing an unknowable future and guilt-ridden past, the statist (the man who believes in the all-powerful state) is essentially someone who is running from his own nature. He is a narcissist who has produced an illusion of grandeur about himself and now needs to use the outside world to convince himself that he is that grand illusion.

While externally the authoritarian personally is confident, swaggering, and perhaps even an elitist, within himself there is a self-loathing that must be kept at bay by the force and power that he is able to project on an external world.

The statist is essentially a guilt-ridden and fearful person who hides his own private nightmare by projecting a fictional image of himself onto the world. That fictional image that he projects is, of course, in conflict with truth and all of the other fictions projected by all of the other statists in the world – it is the little conflict that leads to all of the big conflicts that statists and liberals inflict upon mankind.

“Anyone who thinks himself the master of others is no less a slave than they.”
Jean-Jacques Rousseau