"Beware of Darkness"

This post is about two probably unrelated things that happened at about the same time.

You might remember (or have read) the recent post about our neighbor, who is a friend of mine, whose politics are "Libertarian."  Our neighbor and I have been having some back and forth about this, and I think we have come to a kind of agreement: we are both at least wary of government.  Our Libertarian neighbor takes a short cut, as do all Libertarians, and declares government largely unnecessary, and a problem.  I don't take that shortcut, and I consider government very necessary (in support of my position, I'll point out that so did the Founding Fathers), but susceptible to corruption.  Our biggest problem, and the reason Libertarians have given up on government, is that it's very hard to control the strong tendency of those in government to agree to be corrupt.  I'm unwilling to throw out the baby with the bathwater, but I do recognize that the bathwater needs to be thrown out.

In the meantime, tonight, I watched a documentary I've seen before.  It's the 1971 "Concert for Bangladesh."  It's really quite amazing, and in retrospect, sort of a crowning achievement for George Harrison.

The "Concert for Bangladesh" is a concert.  So it's a bunch of songs performed by some very famous and accomplished musicians.  The musicians performed for free, so the money from the concert(s) (it was repeated, so there were two), and from the sale of records (in the early 1970s) could be used to help the mistreated and starving people of Bangladesh.  It was the first such concert, and "Live Aid" and a number of other similar projects occurred over the years.  This concert might have been George Harrison's idea, and it was stimulated by Ravi Shankar's having told Harrison about this tragedy, and asking him if there was anything he could do to help.  Shankar performed in the concert as well, as did a good number of very famous musicians.  Harrison, Leon Russell, Carl Radle, and Ravi Shankar are now dead, and some of the others might also be.

One song that was sung was "Beware of Darkness."  If you don't know this song, then you're not a big fan of the late Leon Russell (I'm a huge fan), and it was written by Harrison and Russell together, and sung by both of them.  The song contains the line "beware of greedy leaders, who take you where you should not go."

That is certainly a perfect way to summarize my objection to how government (dys)functions, and why Libertarians give up on it entirely.

And I totally understand the overpowering frustration with government.  As I very recently wrote to our neighbor, when the private sector cheats and steals, and enriches itself at the expense of everyone else, it's doing what it's supposed to do in its self-interest.  When government (the public sector), or those who govern and are part of government, cheat and steal, and enrich themselves at the expense of everyone else -- and tell lies so that the public won't realize they've been taken for a ride -- they're doing wrong, and should be held responsible, or at least eliminated from the public sector.  They are the "greedy leaders, who [are not allowed to] take you where you should not go."

I don't expect Libertarians to stop being Libertarians.  They've built up so much understandable mistrust that there's no compelling reason for them to be more trusting.  But I do think that if government could be corrected, maybe at least some Libertarians would reconsider their tendency just to jettison the whole thing.

By the way, Rishi Sunak, who is the Prime Minister of Great Britain, just last week called for new elections.  They will occur about 2-3 weeks after he called for them.  There's no protracted and obscenely expensive process, and people will be elected if the voters already know about them and what they have accomplished.  An approach like that would help greatly to minimize the possibility of "greedy leaders, who take [us] where [we] should not go," and who support a governmental system that leads people like Libertarians to give up, and wish for little or no government.  And the British system doesn't mean that the leanings of the government don't change, or go back and forth.  It's just not founded on fooling the voters, and fundamentally being "greedy leaders, who take you where you should not go."  That's very prominently what happens here.