Three Rules about Government
- What the government gives, the government can take away. This includes tax-advantaged programs (Individual Retirement Accounts, Health Savings Accounts, and 401k plans, for example), citizenship, limited liability protection, subsidies, welfare programs, and investment in a business.
- Businesses can't partner with governments in the long run. The government’s priorities will always take over and consume the business or require continued subsidies that increase the government’s share of the business. Subsidies may also take the form of purchasing goods at above market prices ($1,000 hammers, for example). Furthermore, governments are able to enforce their priorities because they have more guns than businesses have and they can pass the laws making anything they want legal.
- Governments are an instrument of force. They do not earn a profit. They seize wealth through taxation, borrowing, civil forfeiture, and money printing (inflation). And they consume wealth through welfare programs designed to garner votes, wars designed to placate the military industrial complex, and foreign entanglements designed to gain power over other parts of the world. Because they do not have a profit motive, they are inefficient and exceptionally wasteful...by design.
This is why limited government is best.
Robert F. Sennholz