Most people, myself included, would call the government a ‘necessary evil.’ Anyone would love to be in a world where nations generally got along, where citizens and corporations behaved responsibly, and where basic public needs were easily met by our neighbors and religious communities. But of course, that is not the world we live in. As a result, we hand over a portion of our freedom to this entity called the ‘government,’ which is frequently corrupt and sometimes incompetent; but given the choice between subjection to this imperfect institution and a society without supervision, we choose the government. The difference between conservatives and liberals concerns the level of control that we are willing to hand over.
So while the government is necessary, we also recognize that it can be corrupted and thus should evoke fear. It is a fact that almost all of the major tragedies in human history have occurred because of bad government. So shouldn’t we all be political conservatives? Isn’t is just common sense that we should want our government to provide basic protections such as the police and basic services such as roads and then get out of our lives?
My answer is ‘no.’ Although I think that we always need to be vigilant and afraid of our government, there is an entity out there far more dangerous than the government; I’m speaking of the super-capitalists. My term ‘super-capitalist’ does not have a rigorous definition, but I am trying to pick out those in the private sector who control a disproportionate percentage of the means of production. There are lots of small and mid-size private businesses out there, but in modern capitalism, just a few dozen people own almost everything. Over the next few weeks, I want to argue that we should be more afraid of these folks than the government. As a result, we need a government large enough to control them.
