vince and the commune,
an undiscerning philanthropist, an incompetent director of the fine
arts, of science, of instruction, and of worship.[2208] In all these
offices its action is either dilatory or bungling, according to routine
or oppressive, always expensive, of little effect and feeble in returns,
and always beyond or apart from the real wants it pretends to satisfy.
The reason is that it starts from too high a point therefore extending
over too vast a field. Transmitted by hierarchical procedures, it lags
along in formalism, and loses itself in "red-tape." On attaining its
end and object it applies the same program to all territories alike
a program devised beforehand in the Cabinet, all of a piece, without
experimental groping and the necessary corrections;

* a program which, calculated approximately according to the average and
the customary, is not exactly suited to any particular case;

* a program which imposes its fixed uniformity on things instead of
adjusting itself to its diversity and change;

* a sort of model coat, obligatory in pattern and stuff, which the
government dispatches by thousands from the center to the provinces, to
be worn, willingly or not, by figures of all sizes and at all seasons.

V. Final Results of Abusive Government Intervention

Other consequences.--Suppressed or stunted bodies cease to
grow.--Individuals become socially and politically
incapable.--The hands into which public power then falls.
--Impoverishment and degradation of the social body.

And much worse. Not only does the State do the work badly on a domain
not its own, roughly, at greater cost, and with smaller yield than
spontaneous organizations, but, again, through the legal monopoly which
it deems its prerogative, or through its unfair competition, it kills
and paralyzes these natural organizations or prevents their birth; and
hence so many precious organs, which, absorbed, curbed or abandoned, are
lost to the great social body.--And still worse, if this system lasts,
and continues to crush them out, the human community loses the faculty
of reproducing them; entirely extirpated, they do not grow again;
even their germ has perished. Individuals no longer know how to form
associations, how to co-operate under their own impulses, through their
own initiative, free of outside and superior constraint, all together
and for a long time in view of a definite purpose, according to regular
form