If there’s one thing I’ve learned about government, it’s this: whatever the most vile, twisted, backward version of a policy or program could be… that’s the one you should expect the state to deliver.
One of the worst examples I’ve seen of this is organ donation.
On its face, it’s a beautiful idea.
When you die, your organs don’t. Instead of being wasted in the ground, they save someone else’s life. The best part? It costs you nothing. It’s a wholesome act of generosity that literally gives life.
Who wouldn’t support that?
But here’s the thing—once you put a good idea into the hands of a bureaucracy, you have to start asking yourself questions like, what’s the worst-case scenario; that absolute worst way this could play out?
(Because history shows us that that’s the one you’re likely to get.)
At first, it’s almost impossible to imagine. What could go wrong? The whole point is to help people. The only “risk” you might come up with is absurd—like maybe, somehow, they’d start harvesting organs from people who aren’t really dead.
But c’mon, that’s just totally evil. That could never happen… right?
Oh.
Recently, the Department of Health and Human Services discovered that dozens of cases of organ harvesting were begun on patients who still showed signs of life. No, it’s really as bad as it seems.
It sounds like a dystopian movie, but it’s not. It’s the messy, horrifying reality of what happens when moral goods are handed over to bureaucracies with perverse incentives.
Of course the state doesn’t set out to kill people for their organs. But once you introduce centralized quotas, pressure for efficiency, and the dehumanizing grind of paperwork, compassion gives way to process. Add in financial incentives and well…
Patients become “cases.” Lives become “resources.”
This can be applied to literally everything the government oversees.
Without exception, the morally good thing that the government sets out to do gets twisted and manipulated into the worst possible version of itself.
This is why it’s imperative that people understand that the government will never be the best way to achieve a moral goal.
Ever.
It’s a lesson our kids need to grasp early.
In The Tuttle Twins and the Fate of the Future (based on Murray Rothbard’s Anatomy of the State) we show kids how the state tends to corrupt and destroy, not build or improve. It helps them imagine a world with more choice, less coercion, and stronger communities where people solve problems through cooperation and compassion instead of top-down control.
If we want our kids to live in a society where generosity is real and life is respected, then they need to understand the simple truth that the state is an amoral, broken machine. Feed it something good, and it grinds it up into something rotten.
Put it in charge of a noble goal, and you don’t get the best version of that idea—you usually get the worst.
That’s why we don’t teach kids that a bright and prosperous future comes through better politicians or better policies.
Parents like you using resources like ours are teaching a new generation the value of better principles and a future shaped by free people, not bureaucrats.
And it’s working.
Thanks for letting us help in the vital work you’re doing.
— Connor
