The essence of the vast majority of government programs is to solve problems that either are no problems or are problems that only exist because of other government programs. Politicians mostly create the problems that justify their existence themselves. The great classical liberal thinker of the 19th century, Frédéric Bastiat already pointed to this idea in his article “what you see and what you don’t see”. Bastiat realised that the government acts as if the market is a simple system in which it is possible to interfere precisely. But the reality is that the market, as well as society as a whole is an extremely complex system. Every interference in this system has side effects. Some of them are foreseeable others are rather surprising.

The best example for this is the program to redistribute wealth. What we see is that people get money from the state. These people than apparently have a better life or create job. But what we do not see are the people from whom the money has been taken for this program. Here, this same program creates poverty and unemployment. This new poverty and unemployment at one point gains the attention of politics. And how do politicians react to this? Do they realise that this is a housemate problem created by the first government program? No, the reaction of the government is to create a new government program, similar to the first one to repeal this new problem. However, this new program of course creates similar problems as the first one and so a third government program is needed etc.

Once this dynamic is activated it is hard to stop it. That is because every single of these programs creates a group of people that becomes dependent of state money. And every single of these programs destroys a little bit of market dynamics that is it destroys capital and therefore wealth. But the poorer a society gets the harder it is to bring people out of its dependency of state money. Government welfare programs therefore become self-preserving. Although it is obvious that it would be a good idea to repeal these programs it is politically not possible to do so, because it would cause a lot of pain in the short run. No politician can risk repealing these programs without destroying his career.

However, that does not mean that this system can go on forever. At some point in the game, the society is so impoverished that it cannot produce enough wealth to pay for all the government programs. Although the system does not face its immediate collapse at this point, it is clear that every government system faces a major economical and social crisis at some point. Once the state starts redistributing wealth this end is inevitable. It cannot be stopped by voting for more moderate politicians. That would assume that politicians are in charge of the system. But it is an illusion that these inner dynamic of the system can be controlled by any politician, may this politician even been of good character (rare!) or of high libertarian principles (even more rare!!). Even if a Ron Paul was to become the president of the USA, he would not be able to save the system without causing a huge social crisis which his presidency would probably not survive. And although this crisis would not be his fault, he and his principles would be blamed for it.

Government programs do not work. Not only do they not work, they can also only be stopped at the very beginning. Once implemented, they will inevitably lead to a major crisis. The only way of preventing this is to oppose every form of government program. And the best, most save and probably only way to do this is to get rid of the state.