FROM top to toe, our bodies exert control of critical quantities. Our temperature, blood sugar and carbon dioxide levels are all held within narrow limits.
Control is the difference between health and disease, life and death. As you know, this drive for control extends to the world around us, helping shape the environment to make living easier.
Each of us is a natural controller. Which is a problem when we encounter another controller. Two people attempting to control the same resource, or each other, often leads to conflict.
Mankind has been dealing with the conflict problem forever and has developed a workable solution: Property rights. ‘Ownership’ means exclusive control and exclusivity keeps controllers apart.
When we appreciate and respect the blessings of property rights, then civilised behaviour results.
Sadly, the drive to control is very strong. It abhors constraints. Government is the institution we have invented that violates property rights as its main function.
We vote for money transfers known as welfare payments. We vote for protectionist moats around our professions. We demand monetary debasement to artificially reduce our businesses’s cost of capital. We approve its monopoly of violence to make these things happen.
And in so doing, we have created our own Frankenstein’s monster. Wear a mask. Stay at home. Do as you’re told. Submit to control.
The solution? If we recognise that the benefits the Government offers are dishonest and we act accordingly, then the monster will shrink.
It’s not a quick fix, it’s the only fix.
