The good, great, and prosperous society depends on ever-widening trust among strangers. It’s not blind trust — ways to hedge against cheaters abound — but trust is vital. It is as vital as respect for private property and privacy. Like the system of private property, the system of trust can withstand repeated assaults, but it is not invulnerable. It can crumble and fall.
We deal constantly with people around the world whom we do not know (we don’t even know their names) and will never meet. We’re better off — richer and more comfortable — for it. Trust is fostered through repeat dealings, reputation, credit-card dispute resolution, loan collateral, online ratings of sellers and buyers, and more. Think of eBay and Yelp. We need to trust people who have things we want to buy or rent but also people who know more than we do. No one can know everything. Hence, we rely on experts and authorities in the nonpolitical sense.
Imagine if all your dealings were exclusively with the members of your small tribe (assuming you could trust all the members). Life would be far poorer, not to mention short. Adam Smith famously spelled out the reason: the division of labor, specialization, innovation, greater productivity, and trade. Smith went on to say that “the division of labor is limited by the extent of the market.” Globalization — worldwide trust — is the thing to strive for.
The point is that whatever undermines trust on a large scale necessarily undermines civilization, civility, prosperity, and the ability to flourish. It is no small matter.
No individual or private group can erode trust on a large scale. But the government can. To state the obvious, the people who constitute the government routinely exercise powers no one else may exercise. Its monopoly excludes competition and suppresses disagreement. It can disparage rivals and protect its status as the only source of valid information. The state is centralized decision-making in contrast to the decentralized competitive decision-making of the marketplace. Disagreement cannot be suppressed, only rebutted. The marketplace encompasses the production of ideas, not only goods and services. Indeed, if government controls the production of goods and services, it necessarily controls the production of ideas and vice versa.
The state’s power flows from a combination of ideology (analogous to religion) and force that most people consider legitimate because of the ideology they’ve been taught. That’s why the state invests so much in propaganda through schools, media, and other vehicles.
Hellbound and Down 