god save us from better government

Old World Government has always been (supposed to be) an Authority controlling a planned economy. Actually it is a use of force to prevent material progress. The lazy, selfish, dissolute ruler neglects that job. Caligula, for instance, the worst of Roman Emperors, merely wasted goods in extravagant living and enjoyed torturing a few hundreds of his helpless subjects. People always get along comparatively well under a ruler like that.

It was sober, ascetic, conscientious Augustus Caesar who laid the firm foundations of the misery in which all Europeans lived for generations. He began to establish a planned world-economy, the famous Roman Peace that the Roman legions gave the whole world's people by conquering them. (Just such a peace as Hitler, and some of his enemies, are planning now.)

That Roman Peace was designed to last forever. When Diocletian perfected it, its economy was so thoroughly planned and so well administered that farmers could no longer farm nor workers work, and Government took care of them on the relief that taxes provided, until the increasing taxes pushed so many farmers and workers onto tax-supported relief that there was not enough productive energy left to pay the taxes, and the Roman empire with its world peace collapsed into the Dark Ages.

- Rose Wilder Lane, The Discovery of Freedom

Or as Robert Anton Wilson put it:

AN HONEST politician is a national calamity.

At first glance, this seems preposterous. People of all shades of opinion agree that at least on the axiom that we need more honest politicians, not more crooked ones. Please remember, however, that people of all shades of opinion once agreed that the Earth is flat.

Your typical dishonest politician (bocca grande normalis) is interested only in enriching himself at the public expense, a goal he shares with most of his fellow citizens, especially doctors and lawyers. This is normal behavior for our primate species, and society has always been able to endure and survive it.

NOBODY KNOWS ANYTHING, OR IF THEY DO, THEY ARE CAREFUL TO HIDE THE FACT!

An honest politician (bocca grande giganticus) is far more dangerous. He or she is sincerely committed to bettering society by political action. In practice, that means by writing and enacting more laws. Indeed, many groups of idealistic citizens publish rating sheets on politicians every year, and those who have created more laws are estimated as having higher value than those who are frequently absent when bills are voted upon. The assumption is that adding more laws to statute books is a positive achievement, like adding more money to our paychecks or more art works to a museum.

A little thought, however, shows that this assumption is not tenable. Every law creates a whole new criminal class; for instance, when marijuana was illegalized in 1937, several hundred thousand formerly law-abiding citizens became criminals overnight, by Act of Congress. As more and more laws are passed, more and more citizens become criminals. The chief cause of the rising crime rate is the rising number of laws being enacted. An honest politician, who keeps his nose to the grindstone and enacts several hundred laws in the course of his career, thereby produces as many as several million new criminals.

It is furthermore mathematically demonstrable that the more laws there are, the more restrictions there are on the freedom of the individual. If there were, say, only three laws in a given society---e.g., Thou shalt not kill; thou shalt not steal; thou shalt not lie or defraud---there would be only three restrictions on freedom, which all rational persons would accept as obviously necessary to the maintenance of order. When there are several hundred thousand restrictions on freedom, most of them are felt as extremely irksome by large segments of the populace.

In fact, it would take a brigade of lawyers several weeks, minutely examining your affairs, to determine if you are a criminal. Certainly, no ordinary citizen has the time or research facilities to discover if he or she is in violation of one out of skillions of laws currently on our statute books. In many cases, two lawyers consulted independently will give opposite opinions about whether or not a given course of action is in violation of the statutes.

And new laws are being enacted all the time. Obviously, unless there is a sudden paper shortage, the number of laws on the books will eventually reach the point satirized by T.H.White, in which "everything not prohibited is compulsory." It would then probably only take a few years or decades more for a cadre of honest politicians diligently writing even more laws to reach the complementary point where "everything not compulsory is prohibited."

EVERY LAW CREATES A WHOLE NEW CRIMINAL CLASS OVERNIGHT!

At that stage the nightmare world of Orwell's 1984 will be achieved. Crooked politicians, merely interested in the normal human activity of making themselves rich and comfortable, could never create that ultimate horror; but honest and idealistic politicians bring us closer to it every day, with every new law they enact.

These three generalizations -- that national security produces national insecurity; that authoritarianism produces miscommunication and eventual idiocy; and that honest politicians are a plague upon society -- will be found to fully explain the Decline and Fall of Rome, the Decline and Fall of the British Empire, and the Decline and Fall of any country you care to name. They are as universal as Newton's laws of motion and apply to ALL cases.

Of course, the American Sociological Association says I am mad. Mad, am I? They said the Wright Brothers were mad. They said Edison was mad. They said Baron Frankenstein was mad...

- Hagbard Celine (aka RAW),
Laws of Social Cybernetics

RAW and RWL have such similar takes on the world, despite such different aesthetic styles.

Rose Wilder Lane again:

Nobody can plan the actions of even a thousand living persons, separately. Anyone attempting to control millions must divide them into classes, and make a plan applying to these classes.

But these classes do not exist. No two persons are alike. No two are in the same circumstances; no two have the same abilities; beyond getting the barest necessities of life, no two have the same desires.

Therefore the men who try to enforce, in real life, a planned economy that is their theory, come up against the infinite diversity of human beings. The most slavish multitude of men that was ever called "demos" or "labor" or "capital" or "agriculture" or "the masses," actually are men; they are not sheep.

Naturally, by their human nature, they escape in all directions from regulations applying to non-existent classes. It is necessary to increase the number of men who supervise their actions. Then (for officials are human, too) it is necessary that more men supervise the supervisors. Still, individuals will continue to act individually, in ways that they plan. These ways do not fit into Authority's plan. So still more men are needed, imperatively needed, to stop or to supervise these new ways of acting; and more men to supervise these supervisors; and more men to co-ordinate the constantly increasing complexity of all this supervision.

An attempt to exercise a control of individuals that in reality does not exist, must increase in volume.

Bureaucrats are not to blame for increasing a bureaucracy; bureaucracy by its nature must increase.