The Government: Beginning and Purpose
The Government: Beginning and Purpose The Governed City: A Classic Painting If human beings are born free, why do we spend our entire lives obeying institutions we never personally agreed to join? We pay taxes to a government we may not have voted for. We follow laws written by people we've never met, enforced by officers we didn't select. We accept, mostly without daily protest, that a distant authority can compel us to drive on a particular side of the road, serve in an army, or hand over a share of our income for purposes we might not fully endorse. Framed starkly, this looks like an enormous, almost inexplicable act of collective submission. And yet most people, most of the time, don't experience it that way at all — they experience government less as a cage and more as scaffolding, something that makes the rest of life possible rather than something imposed on top of it. That gap between how governmental authority looks in the abstract and how it actually functions...