| Notes | Book |
If you buy a car, do you care whether an executive of the manufacturer is collecting kickbacks from a supplier? Do you care about the salary and perks of the president of the company? It probably never even crosses your mind.
You do care about the quality of car, the price, and whether is fills the needs of your family, and you probably don't think much about the details of how the deal you are offered was created within the corporation.
If the company is corrupt, then the quality of the car, the price, and the ability of the car to fill the needs of your family will suffer, and you will take your business to another company. That freedom serves to limit corruption in private industry.
But many people care passionately about the salaries and perks of senators, congressmen, and the president of the US. They feel government corruption is a direct affront.
The difference is that the government gives you no choice. The government sells protection. You cannot go to several different providers of protection to get the best deal, so the only hope you have of getting a better deal is to protest the incompetence of government.
The only way to minimize the incredible waste and fraud of our present system is to break up this government monopoly.
Something of this sort has historically happened in the breakup of empires. Alternate providers of protection are often called warlords. They evolve from organized crime bosses into a formal government. They usually have an effective monopoly of force over a region of the empire.
This process trades a large government for a small government. It is potentially an improvement because a small criminal organization is probably less cruel, corrupt, and incompetent than a large one, but it leaves the “citizens” with the same lack of choice. They only have easy access to one provider of “protection”.
It might be possible to actually give buyers of protection real choice in the coming breakup of the US Empire by breaking up the empire on ideology rather than geography.
Modern means of communication might make this feasible, or even easier than the old style dissolution.
We already have our citizens sorted into various groups. The largest of these is the politically apathetic group. Then there are the Democrats, Republicans, Greens, Libertarians, etc.
If we could divide up the governments assets and liabilities among these various groups by some agreed upon process, we could achieve the results we desire.
This would mean having many armies and police forces in the same geographical area. Some think that this would cause civil war. But we have already had civil war in nation states that are supposedly unified, including the USA. Possibly, another system could be worse, but I doubt it.
Another political ramification of this process would be the task of computing the net worth of the US government. A cursory Google search of “US Government net worth” was not very helpful. What we hear from the government is that they are always broke. The national debt is trillions and there is not enough tax revenue to feed the beast.
On the other hand, the national treasure is reputed to include the world's largest stash of gold. The public real estate holdings include a substantial portion of the land in the US west of the continental divide, and a lot of buildings both in the USA and around the world. And, of course, there are a whole lot of the world's most sought-after weapons. It is extremely doubtful that the public debt will ever be paid, in any case. Criminal organizations are not famous for keeping their promises.
It might be possible to divide up both the debt and the assets and distribute them to all the interested parties to handle in the way they see fit. Of course the revenue stream from taxes would cease and be replaced by a fee-for-service system.
If this seems chaotic and disorganized, we should remember that we are facing a period of chaos if we let matters take their course.
I believe that dissolving the union in this way would result in a lot more peace. The US government has been pumping violence and deceit into the body politic since its inception, but the rate has increase exponentially of late.
As it stands, we are much more likely to be kidnapped, tortured, or murdered by our own government than any outside force, and we are certain to be extorted by our “rulers”. If different military and police organizations had to compete against each other, we might be a lot safer and more prosperous.
Competition could drive down the price of protection and make it more efficient just as it does any other service, and it could result in a more stable and peaceful social system.