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Your post number 75 is excellent.

The belief that there can be such a thing as a perfect society, inevitably leads us to hold in contempt a society that may be imperfect but fundamentally decent. Imperfect, but fundamentally functional.

I believe that society is "perfectible" in the sense that it can grow and be made better over time. But there is nothing more destructive to human nature than the belief that such perfection is the responsibility of government.

Let me repeat that: there is nothing more destructive than the belief that the perfection of society is the duty of the government.

Leaving aside the infamous experiments of the twentieth century, the ones that ended in mass death, we often forget the others, the ones that are merely dysfunctional but muddle through. The notion that government is the guiding source for a people leads always to the infantilization of the people. It leads to the politicization of every area of life, and gives you a people that is frustrated, angry, and whose self-righteousness resides in being able to identify yet another perceived injustice that the government hasn't gotten around to fixing, and demanding amid tears and histrionics that someone do something.

I love Latin America, there are certain elements of character among the people that I find appealing. But Latin American governments are famously dysfunctional, and I would say fortunately so. The dominant political culture is one that expects a centralized organizing authority, there is no Republican Party as you know outside the US, no libertarian party, you have left wing and right wing parties who would both fit on the left side of the American political spectrum.

But the fact is, of course, that these governments never work well, and as a consequence people develop parallel ways of surviving; family, church, voluntary organizations, people develop personal contacts, and people develop habits of character.

What they don't realize is that they have found what works. But they believe that its not supposed to work that way, they keep expecting a government that is going to set everything aright, and so you have the endless instability that is characteristic. And you have the corruption that is characteristic. What people don't often realize is that such corruption is to be expected, and it is in fact a necessity.

There are actually two kinds of corruption. There is a corruption driven by greed and opportunity, which centralized government makes possible. Put too much authority in the hands of government functionaries, and someone will take advantage of it.

But put too much power over your life into law and regulations and you will have a system that is clumsy, and blind, and tone-deaf, and as a consequence you will have no choice but to find ways around it. Thats when you find it necessary to have a brother-in-law in the planning commission, an uncle in the party leadership, and you wind up offering a beer to a cop to overlook a law you both know is stupid. That second kind of corruption is the only way such systems work, which is to say, they don't work but we all agree to make it look like they do, while living our lives in reality according to what our real needs are.

Engineered societies never work. If you try to make them work, you run the society into the ground, maybe you wind up having to shoot a lot of people. Or, people on their own find ways to jimmy the system to make it work after a fashion. We call that last option "corruption" but eliminate the corruption and the whole system comes apart.

Alternatively, you let people manage themselves, and have whatever laws are necessary to manage the collisions when they occur. Thats the classic American system. If laws are predictable, people will sort it out themselves and they don't need smart guys to figure it out for them. Most people in the end are decent, and need only a basic framework which allows them to work out their own dreams. All people need is for their governors to protect them from being robbed, and to keep the streets paved, and the rest they can and will do themselves. If government is done properly, at least in peacetime, government should be nothing more than a utility. Boring.