At first glance, it doesn’t seem like the most profound insight in the world. But for our world, at this particular time in our history, it is the most critical insight to be had—and the tragedy is that hardly anyone has it.
Here’s the Tweet (yes, I’m still calling them Tweets), from Musk:
So what is so earth-shattering about this observation? We all know the DMV is terrible. For most of us, however, a visit to the DMV doesn’t take all that much time or energy, so we tolerate it…in much the same way that one tolerates the occasional root canal. Do we really need to dwell on why it is so utterly dysfunctional?
Yes. Yes we do.
Musk’s point does not only apply to the Department of Motor Vehicles. It applies to every single government program, and indeed, to every piece of our lives that government touches, which—just as de Tocqueville predicted 200 years ago—now seems to be every piece there is. And it is well worth noting that the DMV is one of the more benign manifestations of state power in our lives.
The word “inefficient” is far too gentle and sanitized a word to describe what governments actually do…
- Hundreds of thousands of people thrown in prison because they ingested, bought, or sold substances of which the government disapproves.
- Private homes and property seized by state officials under eminent domain—so that the folks who bought off the right politicians can have it for themselves.
- Hospitals ordered to shut down their most profitable services and then offered enormous sums of government money…but only if they agree to implement (without liability) protocols that will kill patients en masse.
To grasp the full scope of what the state is capable of, one need only look at the twentieth century’s brutal experiments with total statism, and the mountains of corpses those experiments left behind. Then remove the word “inefficient” from Musk’s Tweet and replace it with “inhuman and deadly.”
A Pattern of Success
Today, most of the developed world lives in some mix of the two systems. Individual rights are upheld to some extent, but everywhere, there exist special groups, institutions, and agencies that have the power to override individual rights. And the extent to which these groups dominate a society is the extent to which that society is dysfunctional. For anyone who doubts this, there are a few concrete indicators to which we can look. First, every year, both the Heritage Foundation and the Fraser Institute rank countries by their levels of economic freedom. And every year, those jurisdictions with the greatest economic freedom also rank highest in every measurable indicator of human well-being, including prosperity, education, infant mortality, access to health care, and a cleaner environment. Second, the graph below illustrates price changes for various industries over time. The industries depicted in red are characterized by a high degree of government intervention, while those shown in blue are less heavily regulated.
The results could not be clearer. The extent to which government is involved in society is the extent to which things do not work.
And remember, the phrase “does not work” doesn’t simply refer to irritating inefficiencies and mild inconveniences. At its worst, it refers to famine, brutality, subjugation, torture of political enemies, and the bodies of millions of men, women, and children who simply got in the way.
In this single Tweet, Musk has correctly identified the source of government dysfunction and, along with it, the source of so much of what ails our world. If we are to have societies in which humans can live together peaceably and flourish, we must build upon the machinery that we already know powers peaceful coexistence and prosperity. And we must abandon the machinery that can only generate the opposite.