Typically, a government reserves the right to use force against individual
people, and such use of force is deemed illegal in the hands of anyone not acting as an
agent of the government. To motivate agents of the government to use such force as necessary to enforce laws, the government must
pay resources to them. Agents acting to enforce laws without getting paid by the government are called
vigilantes and they are considered
criminals. The
resources a government pays to its agents are collected from those the government serves, the citizens. In the case of almost every government, some of the laws
it enforces take away from its citizens a little of what they earn to cover the cost of enforcing the laws.
There exists a belief in the necessity of taking a little of what you produce away from you for the benefits provided by enforcing the laws. This belief appears to grow out of the idea that people agree that
it is morally correct to take a little of what you produce in order to benefit the public. When broken down to a personal level, the question becomes very interesting:
Would you honor a demand from
your neighbor to give him a little bit of each paycheck you earn? How many
people must make the demand in order for you to accept it as
legitimate? There may be a
number or
proportion of people that causes you to feel that the demand has legitimacy. It is an excellent question to ponder in your free time.
An
alternative view to the belief that it is necessary to take a little away from each citizen to pay for the
enforcement of laws is this: Each citizen that believes a set of laws as described by an enforcement agency should be enforced, whether or not it is considered or accepted as the government, will
choose to pay to have those laws enforced. This produces the effect that the most valuable laws will be backed by the strongest enforcement efforts, and those laws that are generally useless will no longer be enforced.
The essential difference between the two kinds of government to which these two opposing views lead is this: The first is a government whose power comes from
coercion, and the second is a government whose power comes from
choice.
The first requires that citizens vote in order to legitimize laws (and/or their law makers) by reaching some as yet unexplained threshold of
consensus. The second uses citizens' ability to choose how to spend their money to determine the value of their laws (and/or their law makers). The first provides an opportunity for
unscrupulous political agents to profit from the use of
coercion while operating
above the law. The second requires that such criminals resort to
deceit, since no coercion is sanctioned, and makes them susceptible to the natural consequences of immoral behavior.