Why Should We Trust Goverment?

Anarchy cannot exist longer than 5 seconds.
In the real world, in the absence of goverment, authority and the rule of law, the law of the jungle kicks in and the strongest, most ruthless warlords are battling for control. Justice, rule of law and consent by the governed don’t exist. It’s pure tyranny.

That’s why we need goverment. The only question is, how much goverment do we need? How much power do we give to goverment?

Citizen Tom produced a series of posts (here, here and here), essentially dealing with the question: why should we trust goverment?
Five years ago I wrote in my post Death Wishes, Etatheism And Putin:

The Left does not trust the individual to run his own life because the flaws of the individual lead to all kinds of real or perceived problems like social injustice etc.
Therefore, in the view of the Left the state has to run and control everything.
But there is a fundamental error in this argument and it is this: Any state, no matter what kind of state, is run by a collection of individual persons with their own flaws and that is why no state can be the more just, better entity that the Left claims that it is.

To believe, as the Left claims that it does, that the state is better than the individual, it has to ascribe divine attributes of perfection that the individual lacks to the state, which makes the Left’s word view a religion. I call it etatheism (etat = state), the deification of the state.

Ironically, the people who have more faith in the state than the Americans, the Europeans, should have the least faith in the state because it was here in Europe, in Hitler’s Germany and in Stalin’s Russia where the state murdered its own citizens by the millions. It was in Mussolini’s fascist Italy and in Franco’s Spain where the state oppressed its citizens. It was in communist Eastern Europe where the state deprived its citizens of the most basic human rights and where it crushed the opposition with tanks and soldiers.
Flaws of individuals can have harmful and undesired effects but flaws of individuals who are collectively running states are magnified by orders of magnitude because of the state’s almost unlimited power and reach (compared to a single individual).

It is because of this great potential of the state to cause destruction and to prevent or diminish prosperity that the state needs to be as least powerful as possible and to interfere as least as possible in the individual’s affairs.
Leftists will, of course, counter my argument by saying that we can eliminate man’s flaws by creating a new system that will create a new man.

But again, the Left is stuck with the same problem. In order to create a flawless, perfect system which eliminates the flaws of the individual, the individuals who are creating the system have to be flawless and perfect themselves.
Again, one has to ascribe divine attributes of perfection to the persons devising such a system.

American political scientist Rudolph Rummel coined the term Democide to describe the killing of people by their own goverment. According to his definition in the 20th century, one of the bloodiest in human history, more people were killed by democide than by war.

Give an evil man a gun and he can kill tens, perhaps hundreds of people.
Put an evil man in goverment and he can kill millions and ruin whole nations.

People give power to goverment because they don’t trust their neighbour, envy their neighbour’s wealth and success or because they fear their neighbour.
Ironically, by giving power to goverment they are giving power to their neighbour because goverment IS their neighbour.
This is what the people who want to give all the power to the goverment don’t understand.

James Madison said “If Men were angels, no government would be necessary.”
However, the very reason why we need goverment is the same reason why we need to keep goverment as small as possible with as little power as possible.