Rick Lowe
Government, as we know, has a tendency to expand until the burden of taxation becomes unbearable for citizens and sometimes there are citizen revolts, like the Boston Tea Party in the US in 1773 for example.
The Boston Tea Party was primarily a result of citizens of the US protesting taxation by Great Britain when they were not getting representation from the British Parliament - Taxation without representation.
But if we go back a little further, Stephen Davis provides excellent insight in The Freeman with an article entitled, Lessons from the Scottish Enlightenment, when in 1708 the UK government abolished the Scottish Parliament,
Pardon the extended quotation that follows, but it makes the point about limited government, much better than I could:
"Moreover, in 1708 the government of the new United Kingdom did something as significant as abolishing the Scottish Parliament. For essentially short-term and trivial reasons the government also abolished the Scottish Privy Council, the center and main instrument of executive government in Scotland for several hundred years. Meanwhile the distinct Scottish legal system survived, as it does to this day.
Salutary Neglect
"The result of all this was that eighteenth-century Scotland, just like the contemporaneous American colonies, experienced “salutary neglect.” The imperial government in Westminster did not legislate affairs north of the border in any detail. What was left was an increasingly efficient and honest legal system together with the Church of Scotland and a system of local government that was much less active than its counterpart in England.
Decreasing Political Domination
"All this had a number of effects that contributed to the sudden dynamism and innovativeness of Scottish society. Talented and ambitious people now looked for other outlets for their energy besides politics and government. In short, they were left to their own devices to sort out their problems and explore their opportunities in a system of law without having to contend with an active political power. Intellectual life was less and less dominated by the political (and religious, since the two were so connected) disputes that had dominated it in the previous century."
"At the same time Scotland, like the rest of the world at that time, experienced sustained population growth because of the gradual improvement of the planet’s climate and the impact of new crops such as the potato. This led to innovation in the context of a society no longer dominated culturally by the values and outlook of a ruling warrior aristocracy—indeed the aristocracy (including the Jacobite ones) now turned increasingly to innovation and “improvement.
"The transformation of Scotland in the eighteenth century and the intellectual flowering that it led to was in part the outcome of an unintended experiment: the removal of much of politics and government from Scotland by the Act of Union and its aftermath. We can conclude that in any society, even the most apparently unpromising, there is an enormous reserve of talent, ingenuity, and insight that can find expression when law and property are stable and government keeps out of the way."
There is no doubt The Bahamas has a huge reservoir of talent, ingenuity and insight, but we have not been able to shake the theory that all success comes from the government protection and hand outs. That the economy is a pie that does not grow as a result of human action and not political design.
It's time the government returned to its rightful place of ensuring the Police and Courts perform as they should.
