The weight of big government ultimately becomes so unbearable that even the most battle-hardened warriors come to fear it over death itself. As Pvt. David Kenyon Webster described his time in the U. S. Army during World War II, they are “more afraid of defying the authority of an officer, backed up by the whole Army and a court-martial composed of officers like him, than we are of death by shell fire.” He continued: “Discipline is fear, not leadership, and we are afraid — not of [the officer] but of the irresistible force that he represents. Afraid for our lives, we are more afraid of the system that holds us in thrall, and so we lie here and wait to be killed, because an officer tells us to lie here.” This is the state of the soldier “in thrall” as it is the state of things under the weight of any massive bureaucracy or tyranny of any kind.
In the case for liberty, there is certainly some tolerance for error or failure, as it is generally suffered by the individual and not brought upon anyone by design . Wherever anyone seeks to empower government, however, one must be reasonably certain of the designs, the logic and the costs, and he must be equally honest about the unknowns as with the foreseeable consequences; after all, there is no margin for error where those designs are administered by the barrel of a gun. One must necessarily remember that government is a monopoly on force and coercion, that force and coercion serve together as the modifying distinction between government and enterprise. It is a kind of force and coercion not by spirit or intention of written law but in accordance with the letter and understanding of the enforcers in their own time, in their own limited judgment and impaired conscience. As opposed to a state of liberty, where mistakes, failures and crimes are unavoidable in the face of human falli