Government's Folly

Every single day I see the stupidity of government, and I find that I am moving more and more away from a minarchist position to an anarcho-capitalist one. One thing I have concluded is that city government is entirely useless. Coming from somebody that grew up in a house where the father was a city cop, this may come as a surprise.

Maybe the complete corruption in this city has helped to point me in this direction. The former Mayor of this state, who got his start in Chicago politics, has just been indicted, along with his brother, and a bunch of his friends on many counts of various corruptions. Every day, somebody closer and closer to the Mayor of this city comes under criminal investigation. Every alderman (our city councilmen), rules over his ward with powers no legislator should have.

You might say that this is just Chicago, the home of the democratic machine, and it is different elsewhere. I doubt highly that it is different in any other large city. Maybe New York’s Burough presidents no longer have king-like powers, but there are still plenty of opportunities for corruption in the city.

Where would all of the “services” come from if there were no city government? To begin with, in my experience as a resident of Chicago, there are only four necessary “services” of city government that citizens don’t readily get from other sources. These functions are trash pickup, water utility service, police, and fire. The rest are completely useless aspects, which are not needed, including government building inspection and cigarette bans (not in the scope of this essay). Let us look at these four services.

First of all, trash pickup. This is a completely useless part of city government, especially since many people in suburban communities have private trash collectors, which unlike city trash collectors, work the whole time they are getting paid, and don’t sleep on the job. This is probably because if they do this for a private company, they will get fired, unlike the city government which doesn’t care because there is no competition to their price of “free.” (That is until some mass media company embarrasses the city by showing trash collectors doing other things than collecting trash on the tax-payers dime.) It is so much better that even the Chicago Park District uses a private company to pick up their trash.

The second “service” is water service. There is no reason whatsoever to have the government provide water service. If private companies can provide other utilities at a much cheaper price than the government, then they can easily provide water at a much cheaper price.

The third and fourth services are fire and police. I could fill a book on the arguments of whether fire departments and police departments would be better off if they were private, but that is not the scope of this essay. The point of this essay is to say that city government is pointless, not all government. I will discuss the possible uselessness of all government in a future essay. The county level of government already has police services in the form of a Sheriffs office, headed by an elected Sheriff. The level of corruption at the city police level is ridiculous, and when the same corrupt officials are picking the heads of the police, what is to be expected?

Sometimes it is the little things that really piss me off, like the turning on the lights and sirens just to run red lights, or turning them on so they do not have to wait to make a turn. Or the fact they can park anywhere they want since nobody will give a squad care a ticket, when, judging by recent news articles, us ordinary folk get tickets when we don’t even break any laws. Sometimes, it is the downright fraud committed (or at least lackluster police work which amounts to the same thing) when it is a fellow cop involved in some sort of incident ranging from a traffic accident to a police shooting. The corruption runs deep, and the lack of ability to fire bad or corrupt cops (unless you embarrass the city) certainly helps to maintain the status quo.

Anyway, I digress. The county already has a police force, and it could easily take over the duties of city police. There are also examples of county fire departments which could easily take over the duties of the city fire departments.

I wonder what it would take to disband a city government. I suppose it would have to be unincorporated some how. There are places in this county that have no city government; of course they probably never had any in the first place. There has to be some way. So, let’s find some way to throw the bums out, and get rid of the completely unnecessary city government.

Remember Henry David Thoreau said “’That government is best which governs least” and then went on to conclude therefore “That government is best which governs not at all.”

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