More Blood & Treasure Into Afghanistan?

By Chris Rossini

Think about the real world...the one that just about everyone outside of Washington DC lives in. When something succeeds, you look to do more of it. If what you're doing is failing and producing harm, you stop doing it.

In the marketplace, when people want iPhones instead of flip-phones, a lot of productive action takes place. Money, labor, capital and time are devoted producing iPhones. Meanwhile, resources are concomitantly removed from producing flip-phones.

This isn't The Garden of Eden. We have to make choices on how to best deal with unlimited wants and limited resources.

More than enough trial-and-error has led us to a formula that works: Stick with your winners, and ditch your losers.

Well, government operates on a philosophy that is completely opposite to this. 

With government, it's all about feeding and perpetuating losses. The recent news that (after 15 years of failure) the U.S. federal government is going to continue to pour blood and treasure into Afghanistan only re-enforces this maxim.

But Afghanistan is only one example. Let's look at how government creates many other Afghanistans that are hidden in plain sight.

When a politically-connected company (think Wall Street firms) get into trouble financially, they would rightly go out of business in a free market.

What does government do? It feeds them taxpayer money and keeps these failed companies in business. 

When a person or business can't get a loan in the free market, because it's deemed by one creditor after another that the risk is much too high, they rightly don't get the loan. 

​What does government do?

It gives these high-risk individuals and businesses loans! Even worse, the government will write laws to force private creditors to grant loans that everyone knows won't be paid back.

See how government works in a perverted manner?

In the real world, you must convince people to buy from you. You can't force them to buy anything. The consumer is sovereign and always has the right and ability to say "No" to any exchange.

What does government do?

It forces you to buy Obamacare "insurance". It forces you to finance the destruction of a foreign country so that Halliburton and Bechtel can rebuild it. It forces you to get that pharma company's vaccination. 

See how it works? All of these examples (and we can talk about many more) are just Afghanistans with a different wrapper. It's all the same concept. Government is a loss generator like no other on Earth.

This is why libertarians and limited-government types want a state that is extremely weak, and that (at most) is tasked with protected liberty.

That's why Americans, until about 1900, produced wealth on a scale that the world had never witnessed. Government was weak and it didn't meddle in every aspect of people's lives.

Americans, at one time, really did breathe the air of freedom.

Now, we're seeing the opposite. Americans have come to believe that not only does government "run the country," it's even capable of "running the world."

Nothing could be further from the truth. The idea that a few people in suits are capable of "running" something as infinitely complex as life itself is comical.

They're not "running," but destroying.

The U.S. government is a giant wealth-destroying machine. Think of Afghanistan and apply it to everything that the state does.

That's not a formula for success.