The Nature of Government

0:00The Nature of Government There are a number of areas of human endeavor and human behavior wherein a certain amount of ignorance continues to manifest. And one of these areas is the area relating to government. Normally people don't really understand it. They haven't taken the time to study it, to understand what it can do and what it cannot do. And the consequence is that they tend to become superstitious about it. They imagine that it can do certain things that it cannot do, and that it can be prevented from doing certain things that it can do. And hence they tend to erect a kind of mythology around it, imagining certain things about it which aren't true, never have been true, and probably never will be true.

0:51So it behooves us to examine this peculiar agency of government to find out what it is, and what in fact it can do and cannot do. Apparently, what is first important would be a definition. We need to define government so that we understand it, and let me give you a definition that is as precise as I know how to make it. I would define government as a group of men who sell retributive justice to the inhabitants of a limited geographic area at monopolistic prices. In other words, what I am saying is that government is a group of men, and that they function by doing certain things for other people, implied in the doing of These Things is the use of compulsion. All governments are based on force of some kind, either the suggestion that force can and will be used, or the actual application of force in use. Now, in order to understand what I mean by that definition, we have to look behind it to see exactly what is being said. When I say that government is a group

2:14of Man. Then I am presuming that there will be a selected group of men, taken out of the population generally, who will be clad in these robes. They will become a special elite group that we think of as governmental people. That is, they are a part of this agency, whereas other people are not. I might point out in passing that probably one of the great myths that we believe in in this country is that the population at large is the government. Now that of course is really an absurdity. The population at large comprises the governed, those who are imposed upon. It is that limited number of persons who have been drawn out of the population generally and have been converted into an elite group that is the government. The government disposes and the people are disposed of, as well as their earnings.

3:14So that is the difference. That's one of the most important myths we have to deal with. The assumption that simply because you have the opportunity of voting, if you do, that that in itself makes you a member of the ruling elite. Actually that is not true. The fact that you vote does not place power in your hands, it merely grants you a momentary choice relating to the person who is going to have the power. And although it is admitted, of course, frankly, that the population at large could change rulers, there is nothing in the arrangement that permits the population at large to rule.

4:00The idea is simply, if you can imagine this analogy, imagine a group of persons, each one in his respective cell, in a large penitentiary. And every four years these persons in the penitentiary get to elect their warden. And because they get to elect their warden, it is said to them that they are really running the penitentiary. But the fact is they never get the keys to their cell, so they remain in them. Now that's in essence the political formula that we have adopted under the democratic banner, which is that we imagine that we have power when in point of fact it is others who have been granted a kind of power over us. And that power is manifested primarily in the seeking of a kind of retroactive justice. That's really what it's all about.

4:57Now while we're examining government and of course one of the areas we will want to take up will deal with the processes whereby this power is bestowed. Where does it come from? Now that's something we want to develop more fully as we go on. But while we take up this area we should examine the nature of politics because we tend to relate the word politics to Government. Actually, the word politics has a number of usages, and they are all quite correct. It's just important that we understand each other so that you know what I mean when I use the term politics, and I would like to specify that politics, as I am going to use it here, will be a method.

5:47Some people call it an art, and some people call it a science. I don't think politics is either an art or a science, but I will call it a method or a procedure, a way of doing things, that politics then is a method by means of which a monopoly of power can be obtained or maintained. All governments deal in monopolies. There is no such thing as any other kind of government, and there never has been. All governments Methods are concerned with preserving the status quo and with providing a monopoly of force in the hands of a limited number. That's the whole idea. Now, the methods whereby this monopoly is obtained or maintained, actually the methods are academic. There are any number of ways that it can happen. Possibly the best discourse on the subject was provided by a man named Niccolo Machiavelli, who wrote about it during the Italian Renaissance. His definitive work in the area is entitled The Prince, and I recommend it if you haven't read it. So far as I know, the statements made by Machiavelli

7:10in the book The Prince have never really been contravened or contradicted substantially. He does state the case pretty frankly, and if you're interested in that sort of thing, I'll recommend the book to you. In any case, politics is a method whereby monopolies of force are obtained, and government is the structure wherein these monopolies of force will be utilized primarily for the purpose of obtaining a kind of retroactive justice. Now that's the idea of government. Sometimes people presume that any use of force at all is government. And you can make a fairly good case for that. And if you do, then we could say that government, like taxes, has always been with us. But I'm going to specify that there are certain prerequisites to government that make a use of force per se not totally be applicable. That is, I will contend that force can arise in a non-government situation and that it isn't government. It is just force. For example, I will contend that if

8:27a man approaches you with a gun and threatens you with that weapon, that that does not make make him your government at the time. It may cause him to influence your actions. And doubtless that is exactly what he would do. But the fact is that he is not a government agent necessarily. If he is a government agent threatening you with a gun, then he would have received A special type of licensing that would enable him to carry the gun as a sanctioned representative of the agency, and that is the thing that comprises government. Government has certain prerequisites for it to exist, which if not present, although it may not eliminate the use of force, nonetheless eliminates government as an agency per se.

9:24Let me list these prerequisites of government and discuss them briefly so that we understand what they are. There are four of them that appear constantly throughout history, and if all four are not present, then you do not have government as such. The first prerequisite, the first factor that you must have if you are to have a government, is a person or possibly a small group of persons who are ready, willing and able to constitute themselves the ruler or rulers of everyone else. In other words, to have a government you begin by finding someone who is willing to act as the titular head of that government.

10:16This is the easiest factor to find. In all the history of man, we have never had any shortage here. There have always been those who were ready, willing, and able to stand forward and say, I would make a good ruler. There has never been a dearth of this, unfortunately, but that would be a prerequisite. If you didn't have, for any reason, if by some process that That type of person didn't appear. You couldn't have a government. You have to have this individual emerge who somehow fancies himself to be better than other people, to feel that his opinions are more valid than other people's, and to feel this strongly enough to be ready, willing and able to employ force to make his opinions accepted. You see, otherwise there would be If he thinks his opinions can be sold and people would voluntarily accept them, then he wouldn't need a government.

11:19He could simply communicate his ideas and people would accept them. But he doesn't think that they're that good. So he doubts his ability to communicate successfully, and rather he relies on force. And that is the reason why he believes that, one, his opinions are more important than and other people's opinions, and two, he can't sell them. Therefore, there is only one way of getting them across, and that's to have power behind him. And so, such a man would be the natural candidate for a ruler. Now, whether you are to call him a king or an emperor or a president or a czar or a dictator or a tyrant or whatever, this is academic. The The point is that he is constituting himself as being someone above everyone else.

12:09We'll have more to say about rulers after a bit. Now the second factor that must appear, the second prerequisite to government, is an extremely important point. It seems very obvious, and because it is so obvious, we tend not to spend enough time The Theory of Money and Credit and then it succeeds only after a long period of time where this second factor appears. Finally, if for example a military force conquers a territory and then imposes rule by force on that territory, this becomes a kind of military control but it is not government. It is simply military control and it will continue to demand absolute suppression of every In the early Roman days the Romans experimented with this and began to make a very important discovery and that was that when they conquered a neighboring territory and imposed rule from Rome, the people simply submitted because there was nothing else that they could do, but they were constantly in a state of revolt so that you could never get anything done in that process.

13:59of Money, The Theory of Money and State, The Theory of Money and State, The Theory

14:29Government, because at this point the people would then submit to the government because they would feel that they had someone representing them and therefore it wasn't really a military despotism, it was a government in fact that would represent their wishes. So this is the thing that has to be obtained if you are to have a government in fact. It is the difference between a rule by bandits per se and by a governing body, and this is a very important point. I can think of no phrase better than the one that Ayn Rand used in her very important novel Atlas Shrugged. She said here, she came up with this phrase and it's a happy one because it defines precisely what is involved, she said, the sanction of of the Victim. And that's an extremely precise way of stating what I'm getting at. In order for a government to exist, in fact, it not only must have the exclusive use of force, it must have a sanctioned use of force. That's the thing that makes a government. Force could

15:43crop up anywhere among men. Men are prone to employ it. But to have a government you You have to have a particular type of force at work, a type of force which is given broad public approval even by the people who are to be victimized by the use of the force. And that's the characteristic. The difference between a government and non-government employment of force is the legal sanction that accompanies force in government hands. That's the characteristic. And without that you may have force, but it is not government. It is simply an erratic or a sporadic force that is employed by some over others, and it is a kind of militarism, and it will serve to suppress people, but it will not serve to release them.

16:38Let me make another analogy so that that point is really grasped. It is in effect the difference Between Having a Prisoner and Having a Slave If you have a prisoner, he is an economic liability. He does not have to produce anything. Characteristically, he will be confined and suppressed. And that's that. A population that has been placed under military despotism, in essence, is a population prisoner to that and despotism, and that is not a government. Now, if that population can be converted into willing workers under the despotism, then you have created a condition of slavery as opposed to a condition of imprisonment. In other words, that is the standard relationship between a population and its government. The people in the population continue to work, is a modified relationship of the slave-slave master condition. If it becomes oppressive, then it, in fact, simply goes to the point where the choices of the individuals are reduced constantly until the people are virtualized.

17:56If it becomes oppressive, then it in fact simply goes to the point where the choices of the individuals are reduced constantly until the people are virtually enslaved as the early blacks were enslaved in this country. That is, their choices are virtually wiped out. And that of course would be the fundamental difference. So the difference then between a governing force over a people and a blind military force over a people is the difference between the condition of slavery versus the condition of imprisonment. If you are imprisoned, of course, you can't produce. But if you are a slave, you can produce, and populations tend to accept a limited amount of slavery which which makes it possible for them to continue to produce and therefore to exercise some control over their lives, and they accept that whereas they will not accept imprisonment.

19:01So it's an important point to keep in mind as we go ahead with understanding the nature of government. Now there's a third point, also very important, one that if it does not exist means that there There is not a government existing in fact, and this is a point of contact between the ruler and the ruled. There have been in the history of man any number of instances wherein there has been a government over a territory, and the people in the territory knew that they were being governed in a sense, and yet there was no point of contact between the and the ruler and the ruled. And hence, in point of fact, there was no de facto government.

19:49Now that is a condition that pertained in the United States on two occasions. It pertained at the outset when we were British colonies. And it related to a great number of the people who came over here from Britain and elsewhere in the early days of colonization. What happened was that titularly we were under the government and hence the protection of the King of England. But in point of fact from 1603 on up to 1760, a period of better than 150 years, the kings and queens in England became largely indifferent to what was going on in their colonies and And the consequence was that the hand of control simply wasn't felt in the colonies.

20:40Oh, there were royal governors sent over, but they had a modicum of power and it would extend only a short distance beyond the particular town in which they made their headquarters. The vast number of people in the area were setting up farms and establishing villages and trade of various sorts in rural communities. And the consequence was the American people were not taxed and they were not regulated by the state. But if you ask anyone of them they would say, oh yes, well I'm a loyal subject of His Majesty the King of England. And yet they were paying no taxes, they were not being regulated and if anybody said anything they didn't like, in essence they turned their back on them and went ten miles further west because we had a territorial freedom by virtue of the fact that we had such a large area to move into, and the consequence was that in a very real sense there was no contact between the ruler and the ruled although psychologically the people felt that they were being ruled

21:46all the time. Now that same condition reappeared in the settling of the West where the development and mining communities and cattle towns and so forth out in the western area went ahead rapidly beyond the ability of government to come in. So you had, in essence, what was called the lawless West. There was no law. There were simply people. And, of course, in spite of television and the modern tendency to dramatize, the lawlessness, ergo the crime and Corruption of the period. In point of fact, a study of those communities reveals that there was very little crime until governments began to get in, more substantially. There were many communities where no such thing occurred. There was no taxes, no regulation, there probably wasn't even a sheriff. And yet these communities became thriving centers of business and industry long before the arm of government was established. Now here again Again you have a case where these people felt themselves to be other than wild-eyed, unruled anarchists or something of the sort.

23:02They felt themselves to be substantial citizens and future citizens of this country. But they didn't have a government because there was no point of contact. There are other instances that could be given, some far more modern than the two I've cited, Wherein whole populations have come out from under a point of contact with their government, they pay no taxes, they have no officials, in essence they are unruled. Therefore if you are to have a government de facto, you must have not only the ruler and the sanction of the victim, but a point of contact between the two, where the force of the one is in in fact imposed upon the other, and the others accept it. Now that would be those requirements.

23:53There is a fourth prerequisite here that is also of considerable importance, and once more we don't pay enough attention to it so we don't understand it, and it is time that we did. In order for any kind of government to exist there must always be an administrative Elite, to enforce and administer the laws or the rules or the you cases set forth by that governing body, whatever it may be. Laws do not administer themselves. You could write law, you could write miles of copy of law every day, and it would be meaningless. The only thing that is actually meaningful about any written law is the extent to which it is to be enforced. You could fill libraries with printed laws and they would have no significance whatever. It is the enforcement arm of government that makes it government in fact. And this is where the power resides. It is the flexed bicep of the military and the state in combination that makes it government what it is. And so in order to have a government you have to

25:09It must be a non-productive elite. That is to say, it has to be people who aren't producing anything, because if they were producing anything, they wouldn't have the time to devote to these wasteful processes of trying to enforce rules on everybody else. And what does that mean? That means that you never have a government, in fact, until the economy has been built up high enough so that surpluses exist that will support a non-productive elite. Therefore you don't really have government per se until you have taxation, until you The Theory of Money and Credit

26:24surpluses produced to make it possible for a non-productive elite to survive. The elite of the primitive times were simply the chieftains who were best at providing for a livelihood for the tribal members, and they were looked to and followed because they were able producers. The political sphere and the sphere of government begins to emerge only when the economy has

27:24Compulsion and Coercion to accomplish this and to obtain the funds by means of which they can get it all done. Thank you very much.