Government Is Not A Service

Government is not a service and government officials are not servants, public or otherwise. Governments are influential organizations that acquire money from individuals and organizations (e.g., businesses), fund and implement some programs and not others (thereby benefiting some, others to a lesser degree, and some not at all), wage war, and imprison more than a few.  Government personnel, rather than servants of the citizenry are its rulers, readily admitted when describing personnel in government–as Hobbes named them–“misliked.”

Also relevant to this point is a statement by Benjamin Franklin Bache, who wrote in a 1794 Philadelphia Aurora editorial: “All governments are more or less combinations against the people . . . and as rulers have no more virtue than the ruled.”