Lex Fridman: belief

Transcript context

…Perhaps some of them assume they’re doing good, but interestingly, it always results in the state accumulating more power at the expense of the individual. Then where does it stop? We humans are not very good at finding the right balance, and in this case, the right balance between chaos and order, between freedom and structure. We tend to go to extremes. I think you still consider yourself a libertarian. There is something about government that always over time naturally builds a larger and larger bureaucracy. In that machine of bureaucracy, it accumulates more and more power. It’s not always that one individual member of that bureaucracy is the one that corrupts the initial principles on which the government was founded, but just something over time, you forget. You begin to censor. You begin to limit the freedoms of the individual, the ability of the individuals to speak, to have a voice, to vote. It just gradually happens that way. And the government is not some abstract notion. The government consists of people and these people have goals. They would naturally be inclined to increase the level of influence, to have more subordinates, to have more resources. That’s how you end up in an endless loop of ever-increasing taxes, ever-increasing regulation, which ultimately suffocates free market, free enterprise, and free speech. So, you do want to have very, very strict limitations on the extent the government can increase its powers at the expense of citizens. Ironically, you don’t have those limitations. You’re supposed in all countries, which are considered to be free. It’s supposed to be the constitution that protects everybody, but interestingly, it doesn’t work always this way. They are able to find very tricky phrasings in order to carve out exceptions and then the exception becomes the rule.…

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