What is government? Professor William Graham Sumner explains:
As an abstraction, the state is to me only All-of-us. In practice — that is, when it exercises will or adopts a line of action — it is only a little group of men chosen in a very haphazard way by the majority of us to perform certain services for all of us. The majority do not go about their selection very rationally, and they are almost always disappointed by the results of their own operation. Hence "the State," instead of offering resources of wisdom, right reason, and pure moral sense beyond what the average of us possess, generally offers much less of all those things. Furthermore, it often turns out in practice that "the State" is not even the known and accredited servants of the state, but, as has been well said, is only some obscure clerk, hidden in the recesses of a government bureau, into whose power the chance has fallen for the moment to pull one of the stops which control the government machine.Who's got more power the billionaire or the "obscure" clerk at the EPA that can shut your business down in the name of "the public interest"?
