By Joakim Book,  American Institute for Economic Research

I don’t like governments. I don’t like how they are set up, how they’re ruled, how their existence furthers a one-size-fits-all approach to complicated social problems, or how they distort markets and behavior when they grab a share of every productive economic activity that they can spot. I don’t like how they’re the antithesis of liberty, and I particularly don’t like how their services – almost always and everywhere – are subpar.

It would be one thing if governments took 50%, 60%, or 75% of the value you created but gave you such excellent services in return that you felt like you got your money’s worth.

Instead, we get a hodgepodge of regulatory failures, bank bailouts, dead kids in the Middle East, and a runaway national debt, while politicians live grand lives at the expense of the subjects they pretend to represent. Emergency by fake emergency, they grow in size, inching the battle lines of respectable power wielding a little further each time.

Everyone I know has stories about government malpractice, about navigating impossible bureaucratic jungles, about unfair tax practices or creatively interpreted conditions that render the service for which they’re supposedly eligible less than useful.

READ MORE