Jeff Nadel | Hooray for humiliated government

Politicians, commentators and other Washington-watchers so often gripe about the slowness of government in solving problems, the incompetence of bureaucrats and the putative ills of gridlock, a do-nothing Congress and the other obstacles that stand in the way of what they believe ought to be.

This Thanksgiving, I say we should be deeply thankful for the sheer ineptitude of the state.

We should relish in the government’s inability to control the internet, hide its spying programs from citizens and capture every last nonviolent drug offender. We should see the beauty in the government’s incapacity to totally eradicate disruptive innovation and currency competition.

It means we’re a whole lot more free, and it affirms that the state cannot, with its tentacles of coercion, control every last aspect of our lives. In fact, its control may very well be starting to slip away.

Last Thursday night, Jeffrey Tucker — an author, publisher, scholar and unquestionable gentleman — gave a talk to Penn for Liberty via Skype. With a wide smile and gleeful intonation, Tucker spoke about the practical limits of government power.

This is a man who has the truest appreciation for the human spirit and all that it can accomplish when it is unfettered, and he certainly offered the attendees a hard-to-find sense of optimism about the future.

A mix of modern technology and human ingenuity is causing the power of the state to unravel before our eyes. It is downright naive to chalk up repeated failures of government planning to “those silly bureaucrats,” who — many hope — are sure to figure it out sometime soon. No, the apparatus of the state is inherently inefficient, ineffective and impossibly powerless to stop humans who come together to do great, powerful things in the modern world.

As Tucker pointed out, mere hours after the federal government shut down the Silk Road, the now-infamous online marketplace for all things illicit, multiple replacements popped up on the Deep Web. The important aspect to consider is that the government’s power is so limited — and it is limited largely to the physical realm. They found the original site’s creator and servers. So they shut them down.

But what about the dozens of clones? What about the servers that cannot be so easily found? What about the systems that replicate their files across thousands of computers around the world? The institution that could not — for hundreds of millions of dollars — successfully create an online, health-insurance marketplace surely cannot pose a serious threat to these internet innovations.

What about Bitcoin, the open-source, decentralized cryptocurrency that’s taking the world by storm? Tucker, the founder of the Crypto-Currency Conference, noted that it’s a currency that is entirely outside the regulatory, money-printing apparatus of the state. Whereas the Federal Reserve can inflate or deflate the U.S. money supply at will and without oversight, the supply of Bitcoin is predictable.

Everyone knows exactly the rate at which new bitcoins come into existence, and the code on which the entire system is built is open source and viewable to the world. No surprises. No bubbles. No government-produced inflation. And even though people predicted the currency would collapse once it reached a price of $1 per bitcoin and then they forecasted a crash when the Silk Road was shuttered, the currency is at $840 at the time of writing.

We might wonder how the government will respond when it is confronted with a force so great that no arsenal of guns, battalion of tanks or collection of bombs can stop it and no spy network can track it.

Surely we should expect rage from the establishment over a currency its bureaucrats cannot control, a currency that threatens the monetary policy monopoly of the Federal Reserve and — maybe eventually — the taxation and predation powers of the state. Instead, the Washington Post could characterize the recent Senate hearing on the currency only as a “Bitcoin lovefest.”

The only thing the government detests more than losing control is being humiliated, so it will embrace that which it cannot control so as to avoid the appearance of losing control over something it so desperately wants to bridle.

We should delight in government impotence because they allow the market to provide the kind of solutions that people actually want, instead of the ones that a Leviathan government determines are appropriate for us.

Jeffrey Nadel is a College junior from Boca Raton, Fla. His email address is jnadel@gmail.com. Follow him @theseends. “Give Me Liberty” appears every other Monday.

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