For any of our natural rights to be secure, there must be some earthly enforcement arm to protect natural rights and punish those who encroach upon them. The means of doing this that man came up with is government.

This is not to say that government is an enlightened or moral thing – it, like the state of nature, is hopelessly wicked to the core. A government, definitionally, is a human organization with the legal privilege of using force on innocent persons. As George Washington, summed it up, “Government is not reason; it is not eloquence; it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master.” Government alone demands your unquestioning obedience, and drags you off to prison in chains to be tortured, executed, or whatever other dark measures it can imagine as punishment for refusing to grant it. It alone plunders your hard-earned money without consent, regulates your property, enslaves the citizens living under it, and sends your sons to bleed and die waging its wars. It relies on brute force, intimidation, and coercion to achieve its ends. This is the sum of political power – the most dangerous tool human beings have ever discovered. It is not natural for men to wield such vast and unchecked power over others – and consequently political power corrupts the morals, clouds the judgment, hardens the heart, and rots the soul. It is completely irrelevant where it comes from – consent of the people, aristocracy, monarchy, police statism – all beside the point. Political power has always been and will always be a fundamentally wicked thing. “What is government but the greatest of all reflections on human nature?” pondered James Madison in Federalist No. 51. “If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither internal nor external controls on government would be necessary.” It is a reflection that reveals the wickedness and depravity of man – his sinful nature writ large.

The state of nature and a state of unchecked political power are equally evil situations. The only chance men have to be free is to limit government to the specific, singular purpose of protecting natural rights – absolutely anything beyond this, is abuse.

For example, government must secure the right to life by criminalizing murder and similar crimes, and severely punishing those who engage in it. Government must secure a right to liberty by created laws against slavery, involuntary servitude, and other such crimes, and punishing those who disregard them. Government must likewise protect property by creating laws against theft, vandalization, arson, and trespassing, and that it create of functioning system of written property deeds and land titles, as well as enforcing the terms of contracts, that such a right may not only survive, but flourish.

the one and only legitimate purpose of government is not to create laws at its discretion but to enforce those laws that existed before its creation – those laid out by God. Thomas Jefferson eloquently envisioned the a “wise and frugal government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, which shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. Such is the sum of good government.” “The natural liberty of man,” said Samuel Adams, “is to be free from any superior power on Earth, and not to be under the will or legislative authority of man, but only to have the Law of Nature for his rule.”

Such a system where government exists, but is crippled to the point of just barely having the ability to enforce the Natural Law, is a system known as Liberty. It has never been fully achieved in human history, and Bastiat lamented, it probably never will, but the closest any civilization has ever come to true liberty is in America, roughly from 1776 – 1819. During this glorious age the esteemed lawyer and intellectual John Quincy Adams declared: “Our political way of life is by the Laws of Nature, of Nature’s God, and of course presupposes the existence of God, the moral ruler of the universe, and a rule of right and wrong, of just and unjust, binding upon man, preceding all institutions of human society and of government.”

But I’m a realist. Government has a nasty tendency to expand beyond this ideal bare minimum – and whenever it does this, it necessarily will encroach upon natural rights and violate the Natural Law, thus undermining the very reason for its existence: the preservation of life, liberty, and property. This lamentable truth is due to the fact that political power corrupts, a fact that cannot be possibly stressed enough. Those entrusted with it have but three objectives (1) to keep the political power they have (2) to use that power on others (3) to get more power.

Even in carrying out its legitimate function government must be constantly watched. Because those who have political power are not focused on your wellbeing but on the use of and pursuit of more power, they seldom prize efficiency in fulfilling their promises. In addition to being the most hopelessly evil and corruptible institution known to man, Bastiat knew government to be the most time-consuming, least efficient, and most expensive way to get anything done.