The Mafia

or, the Government. It really is hard to tell, sometimes . . . Arnold Kling[*1]

Think of government as a charity. From a libertarian perspective, it is a charity run by the Mafia, which will break your knuckles if you don’t make your donations. It is also a badly mismanaged charity. It funnels lots of money into questionable causes, and even when the causes are good the programs that it funds tend to be very wasteful.