Attributed to George Washington (dubious).Government is not reason, it is not eloquence,—it is force! Like fire, it is a dangerous servant, and a fearful master; never for a moment should it be left to irresponsible action.
The state can be compared to fire. If it is put off, people are left in the dark and in the cold, without being able to use fire to make tools and cook food. However, the nature of the fire is to expand; to keep burning as much as it can, engulfing more and more with its flames. Without the state, people are left unprotected, without a neutral agent to mediate and offer certain public services which the market (supposedly) cannot provide. But the state has the natural impulse to grow more and more, consuming liberties and rights in the process.
This is a well-known fact. The Founding Fathers of the United States knew about this; "a republic, if you can keep it". They knew that people could easily give away their rights to whomever offered them special benefits, or appeal to their emotions.
Attributed to Alexis de Toqueville (possibly based on an actual quote of his). Also:The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public's money
_______________________________________________Even despots accept the excellence of liberty. The simple truth is that they wish to keep it for themselves and promote the idea that no one else is at all worthy of it. Thus, our opinion of liberty does not reveal our differences but the relative value which we place on our fellow man. We can state with conviction, therefore, that a man's support for absolute government is in direct proportion to the contempt he feels for his country.
Égalité is an expression of envy. It means, in the real heart of every Republican, " No one shall be better off than I am;" and while this is preferred to good government, good government is impossible.
In his book The Road to Serfdom , Nobel Prize Friedrich Hayek explains how state intervention to solve a "problem" in society, whether real or fictitious, will always lead to more state intervention. Let's say that a state wants to solve "inequality". It imposes "temporary" quotas, it launches propaganda, it promotes these ideas in education, it gives welfare and subsidies, it imposes penalties on those who exert "discrimination"... So far, people have lost freedom of commerce, freedom of thought, freedom of speech, freedom of education, some suffered penalties for not adhering to the policy... and lots of money were spent in the process.
Now the state has to pay for it. It can increase taxes, go into debt and/or print money. This can in turn lead to devaluating the currency and harming the economy through the imposition of articial economic burdens on the average citizen. To solve this, they may resort to price controls which require a certain degree of surveillance and coercion to be enforced. This scares investment away, causes artificial scarcity and, of course, takes away economic liberties. To maintain stability, they may exert pressure on media (or take over it) and distort statistics to give an impression of success and deceive the public. There is now a greater bureaucracy in charge of "correcting societal ills", controlling prices, bribing private institutions, lying to the public, persecuting dissidents, managing money and other tasks, which may occasionally indulge in some good ol' corruption.
And "inequality" is still there, but your rights are not, even though you were told all those measures were only temporary. Feel free to apply this analogy to any "societal ill" of your choosing; racism, wage gap, the environment, covid, culture, etc.
The positivist, rationalist idea of creating "utopias on earth" which the Enlightenment brought about is unfeasible. All of these utopian movements which seek to "correct" society think of society as a machine which can be programmed and engineered to be perfect or ideal. The only thing necessary is to have the right people in charge and meet certain conditions, be it the abolition of private property, the destruction of (real or fictional) institutions like the family, the church, the patriarchy, whiteness or even the state, the centralization of power, the existence of certain laws, etc. Among these ideas are: technocracy (government by expert), feminism (abolishing the patriarchy), socialism (abolishing private property), platonism, higienism, autarchy, positivism, saint-simonism, sociology, social engineering, enlightened despotism, etc.
As explained by Hayek in The Fatal Conceit and by Jesús Huerta de Soto in his lectures, the state cannot replace the market, not even if they had a supercomputer capable of keeping track of all people. There is no way of predicting human behavior, natural ocurrences and computers cannot understand subjective knowledge. One may read a book on riding a bike, and still not be able to ride it in real life. A blind man can touch a cube and learn about it, but when he gains sight, he doesn't recognize it. Computers cannot compute the subjective experience of a human being, they cannot value art, trends, understand feelings and compute the irrational ways in which humans behave at times.
That is why the Soviet Union collapsed. They abolished the market and the idea of prices. After doing that, they destroyed the only way they had of knowing what products were scarce and which ones were highly valued and which ones weren't. This led to poor allocation of goods and imbalances such as producing more shoelaces than shoes. They even resorted to American magazines to learn the prices of different goods and use that as reference to know how to manage the products of the USSR. That is why Khrushchev allegedly said that when “the world is socialist, Switzerland will have to remain capitalist, so that it can tell us the price of everything”
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There's also a great video called "Communism will always be violent". It's excellent.
To bring about communism, one must first pass through the "dictatorship of the proletariat"; socialism, in which all means of production are collectivized in the hands of the proletariat (see dekulakization). To achieve this, a violent revolution is a must. After that, some people will try to flee, which requires guards to stop them from doing so (see Cuba or North Korea). Since there is no space for private gain, the incentive to work is lost or greatly diminished (they pretend to pay us, we pretend to work), thus it is necessary to threaten people to work or offer them worthless awards. People will eventually protest, which means you have to take their guns to prevent them from revolting, and you must control all local media so that those subversive ideas won't disseminate. You must also censor all media from the outside world, to prevent them from seeing how people live in other countries and wanting to escape.
The whole socialist society can only exist through violence alone. In the process, it may create a corrupt, bureaucratic and military elite, which is exempt from this "utopia" and gets the best share.
The video expands on this subject, and it's very short, so don't miss it.
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CONCLUSION
Whether there is a conspiracy or not (there is, though), we must realize that it is inherently in the nature of the state to increase its power. It is inevitable; liberty begets more liberty, and authoritarianism breeds more authoritarianism. Our role as citizens is to keep it in check, to make sure coming generations won't live in totalitarianism and we don't destroy the inheritance our ancestors earned for us. There will always be a politician with the perfect excuse to erode our rights, so there must always be an educated, responsible populace who will always do its best to keep them.