Wednesday, August 26, 2020

What Governments Are For

 Governments are formed by people primarily to do jobs that need to be done, but which have no deliverable product that can be readily sold to show a profit*. National defense for example, paving and maintaining roads, and police work. One has an expectation , in that last example, that the police will, if not eliminate crime, at least minimize it by their presence. Lately we've been getting a dose of what happens in their absence as municipal governments, for one reason or another, refuse to act to stop increasingly violent rioting and looting.

Now in Kenosha, they may have gotten what they wanted in the form of a scapegoat. Not for the looting, which they still seem to approve of, but someone to punish for acting where the government has refused. 

It's still early and the fog of war is still quite thick, but when rioters run amok and the municipal government refuses to stop them, why should anyone be surprised when the citizens step in to deal with the problem? 

*This is probably why government work is so notoriously shoddy. If you deliver a mediocre product, what would the people do, farm the work out to an adjacent government? True, the obvious solution is to vote the incompetent bums out, but how often does that happen? Governments are quite good at only one thing, and that is self-perpetuation.

No comments: