I’m afraid I am briefly going into politics, a sticky subject but read on, it’s on one question. A friend on Facebook, and some of his friends, opined that the world would be better off without government as governments caused wars, repressed the people, and so on.

Imagine a world without government. There would be no interference with our lives, and no taxation. Everything I earned would be mine to spend as I pleased. Health authorities could act without focusing on targets, focusing instead on providing health care to those in need. Teachers could spend their time educating our children instead of preparing them for tests and making sure that the target-driven paperwork was completed. There would be no call for a military to defence the country’s interests against the malevolent designs of other governments. Society would have no bipartisan politics to concern them and could start looking at what was ‘right’ and not what was ‘ideological’. Heaven.

Imagine a world without government. No taxation, so I would be responsible for building my own roads, parks and amenities. Which of course I would, all on my own without the help of other people also acting in their own self-interest. I could also spend on my own health care with the money I had left from buying a road. I could ‘send’ my children to a local, self-funded home school with the money I had left after that. Then, when someone with a malevolent motive such as greed, or even hunger, decided to attack me for what I had, I could buy a gun and defend my stuff – other people can defend their own, of course. And we’d save on the cost of government, elections and other waste.

You see, the one thing that government and taxation does is that it makes me pay for the better good. As a middle-income earner giving 25% of my money to government, I was forced to pay towards the security of the country, the building of infrastructure and the safety and health of the less privileged. Without government I would have been unable to do that unless I did so with other like-minded people in several, broad ranging and diverse special-interest groups all vying for my time and money. And let’s be frank, inability is one thing – willingness would be another. You complain that the rich would not contribute to the better good – well, many do, but taking your point, would they be any more likely to do so if there wasn’t a government making them contribute something, even if the loopholes reduced that level of ‘something’?

Government is, generally, good. People in it may occasionally be lowlifes, but in general the alternative is not as sweet as anarchists would like to think. Perhaps holding governments to a higher standard is a better objective than just getting rid.

Weekly Challenge

Question your motives, see if they are as objective as you think. There is often an alternative viewpoint that you can still accept, if only you are willing to see it might exist. That is proactive.

And wherever possible, exercise your vote.

Blog Part

This week, I are mainly being ill. (British readers will understand that terminology.) I think the diet made me a bit constipated, so I took a pill and the world fell out of my bottom. (Too much information?) I was then very, very tired for a day but recovered enough to execute another 5.74 mile run only for my knee to flare up as it did last week – I’ll have to monitor that but resting seems to do the trick. I therefore anticipate doing 4 runs a week instead of 6. On the plus side, 194lbs, so inside the target.