Death by Government

Give me liberty or give me... what was that again?

Probably no aphorism is more aphoristic than: "Nothing is certain but death and taxes." But maybe it should be "Nothing is certain but government." The two salient traits of government are force and taxation, and the ultimate use of force is to kill.

If you refuse to pay your taxes and you resist being arrested for it, they will kill you. Death by government is far from being an outlying possibility. Governments kill lots and lots of people. If you were honest about it, then "government" ranked pretty high on the list of causes of death in the 20th Century, and lots of other centuries, too.

Some people would say that the most salient trait of government is laws. But you don't have to have laws to have a government (rulers can rule by edicts which technically may not be laws) and you don't have to have a government to have laws. Clubs can have laws, and so can a lot of other systems of human interaction. Physics can have laws but no government.

 • If we define a system as a set of parts that interact according to rules.

 • And then we point out that in a system of human interaction people are parts.

 • Then a law in a system of human interaction is a formalized rule.

And what makes a government, as a system of human interaction, a government is that it enjoys the legal use of force, and the other systems of human interaction do not. The club you belong to cannot legally kill you. Government can employ force to exile or to imprison or to torture, and the ultimate use of force is to inflict death. "Ultimate" because after that there is nothing more they can do to you, except tax your estate.

(And a government without laws is one where a dictator rules by issuing commands one at a time. Such a command is not a formalized rule.)

So laws are not the salient aspects of government. Force and taxation are. If "Nothing is certain but death and taxes," is true, then it is true because nothing is certain but governments, which cause death and taxes.