Can Government Provide Valuable Service?
A reader sent me the meme here. My response:
Do you know anyone who lives in a country that offers its citizens free healthcare and education through college? That would be the entirety of Western Europe and Scandinavia, and most of South America. Then you have Turkey, Australia, Bahrain, Belgium, Brunei, Canada, Cyprus, Hong Kong, Iceland, Ireland, Israel, Japan, Kuwait, New Zealand, Singapore, Slovenia, South Korea, the United Arab Emirates, and the United Kingdom.
I know plenty of people in these countries, and this is not their experience. They pay slightly higher taxes, but they receive extremely valuable services from their government. In addition, their cities are not littered with homeless people, and they think that’s an important component to their nation’s aesthetic.
Here’s a list of the top 10 happiest countries on Earth. Every one offers free healthcare. All but Taiwan provide free education.
- Finland
- Iceland
- Denmark
- Switzerland
- Netherlands
- Sweden
- Germany
- Norway
- New Zealand
- Austria
Obviously, this is not the case in the U.S., but our government, via its tax base, does provide each American with lots of important things: infrastructure, police, fire fighting, criminal justice, national defense, public education, labor laws, auto and food safety standards, air traffic control, TSA, libraries, emergency medical care, environmental regulation, social security, Medicare, the National Archives, national parks, bank regulations and deposit insurance, copyright and patent laws, federal dams to provide electrical power, flood control, the Weather Service, the Federal Housing Authority, consulates and embassies, FEMA, veterans affairs, public water systems, monitoring of all international cargo, NASA, border protection, and the National Institutes of Health.
You seem to believe that your gun is going to protect you from the U.S. government if it had the will and authority to harm you. I’m not sure how well you would fare against 1.1 million active duty military personnel armed with billions of dollars of weaponry, not to mention 1.3 million agents of law enforcement.
