Libya Civil War: When Governments have no Constraints

In political discussions, it is common to encounter the statist remark that we need some sort of iron hand dictator who will teach us discipline and fix up our country. They think that bureaucrats should put constraints on citizens and not the other way around. We see that there are individuals in Libya who are risking their lives with the opposite sentiment.

I find that there is value in assuming that bureaucrats will abuse power and so we have to keep governments extra-small, extra-transparent, extra-limited. The idea is that you assume that every bureaucrat is a potential Gaddafi and so we put as much constrains as we can on them.

In psychology, they call it Stockholm syndrome when hostages have positive feelings toward their captors. They give people street lights, roads, medicine, etc. and people start to feel positively towards bureaucrats without taking into consideration billions being stolen and limitless debt, and both concealed and blatant coercion.

Aside from every bureaucrat being a potential Gaddafi, every place in the Philippines is also a potential Maguindanao massacre waiting to happen. This is because we allow politicians to steal millions, giving them the resources to buy guns and goons and conspire to use force to be able to stay in power. They are able to steal billions because we allow them to have so many unnecessary projects, without any kind of real and tangible transparency.

When governments have no constraints, they will resort to killing their own people to preserve their authority, just as in Libya. In a speech of Yuri Maltsev that I watched recently he explains how there were reports where Lenin had no choice but to order the murder of his own people just to sustain his big government dystopia.

Yuri Maltsev Talks about Big Government

In China, their big government restricts or regulates the use of social media like Twitter, YouTube, Blogger, Facebook. This is seemingly not as violent as the current restrictions or regulations in Libya, but to me it is just as demeaning and poisonous. They are not murdering their people but they are imprisoning them, keeping innovative means of communications away from them, in fear that this will expose the evils of their authoritarian rule. And it will: just as social media had a significant role in toppling other authoritarian governments like Mubarak's regime in Egypt.

If the same kind of restrictive internet policies happen here (Filipinos being the 6th most number of users of Facebook in the world) there might just be an uprising just like the one happening in Libya right now. Violence is just so scary, I always tend to think of my loved ones when I reflect on political issues. Seeing Libya on the news with all the violence and the rape issues, I really become so fearful and protective of my loved ones. And that is probably the number one driving force I have in writing on this blog.