Government is disintegrating because it is, from an economic point of view, a “tragedy of the commons.”

When the democratic State has the ability to take as much money as it likes from whomever it chooses, it will necessarily and eventually turn the entirety of society against itself. It will foster, through the public trough, a mad rush for each political interest group to acquire as many resources as they can, as quickly as they can, before those resources are expropriated by other interest groups. Of course, the largest and most powerful interest groups will always get the biggest slice of the pie.

The tragedy of the commons explicitly shows us that modern democratic States are ALWAYS unsustainable if they are allowed to use violence against the population in order to make the money supply of the population common property.

Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide. –John Adams (1814)

To illustrate the point, one merely needs to consider the current statistics (well, more or less current, the reality is actually worse):

Statistics vary slightly but it can be argued that the top five percent of US households pay 60% of federal income tax. Ten percent account for over 75%. Another two-fifths make up the rest. And half are exempt. And yet…twenty percent of US households get 75% of their income from the federal government. Another one-fifth receives 40% of their financial support from Uncle Sam.

And that’s just the legitimized transfers and doesn’t take into account the stealing from the public trough. It continues to amaze me how people can attribute some kind of collective wisdom to government and maintain the image of the neutral public servant, when the individual behavior of government employees is no better and arguably worse than that of the rest of the citizenry.

But anyway, the commons is over-grazed. There is no money, other than the Fed’s daily printing. Almost half of federal government spending is freshly printed money as tax revenues fall far short of expenditures. No-one seems to point out that printing money to fund government is the last death rattle of the fiscal system. Take a look at the future as the conversion of government from a service organization to a vote-buying redistribution mechanism causes its collapse.

A sign taped to the entrance of police headquarters says it all: “Closed weekends and holidays.” Every weekday, the doors are locked at dusk.

It’s not that the cops here are scared; it’s just that they’re outmanned, outgunned and flat broke.

Flint is the birthplace of General Motors and the home of the U.A.W.’s first big strike. In case you didn’t know this, the words “Vehicle City” are spelled out on the archway spanning the Flint River.

But the name is a lie. Flint isn’t Vehicle City anymore. The Buick City complex is gone. The spark-plug plant is gone. Fisher Body is gone.

What Flint is now is one of America’s murder capitals. Last year in Flint, population 102,000, there were 66 documented murders. The murder rate here is worse than those in Newark and St. Louis and New Orleans. It’s even worse than Baghdad’s.