Who Needs a Government Anyway?
Government is something that people are always talking about, be it the news anchors on TV or Jimmy Fallon on The Tonight Show or, in this case, Mr. Henry David Thoreau in his essay On the Duty of Civil Disobedience . His long and dense piece can be summarized in two sentences: A) “That government is best which governs not at all” (Thoreau 1) and B) Always disregard authority and, whenever the opportunity presents itself, be a rebel. In Thoreau’s case, what he did made sense. He refused to pay taxes because he knew that his money was being used to fight a war that he disagreed with, and consequently he went to jail for it until someone payed his taxes for him. He rebelled because he disagreed with something the government was doing. But then he wrote a 16-page essay about how the entire government system sucks and is completely unnecessary. Which I completely disagree with. Having a government is imperative. How else will a country and its citizens remain in order, and be s...