Government, at its heart, has but one purpose: To protect the liberty and property of the citizens. Whenever a government, any government at any level, loses sight of that key purpose is then the society that government oversees and operates within starts to decline. This has been the case throughout human history, from the Greek and Roman republics to date.
It's happening here, right now, in the United States, where local governments are protecting various criminal, illegal alien from capture and repatriation by federal immigration authorities. And it's happening in Europe, most notably in the United Kingdom, which was once America, Original Recipe, and now is something completely different.
A recent piece in the UK's Daily Sceptic has some interesting insights into the Britain that was, the Britain that's becoming, and how the "nice" British people are allowing it to happen.
Britain is run by terribly nice people. And it is easy to be terribly nice if one lives in one of the many parts of the country that are themselves terribly nice. Contrary to how things might appear in overseas media these days, there are vast swathes of this country which remain exceptionally pleasant. Crime is low; neighbourhoods are peaceful and well maintained; there is greenery everywhere; there is a decent dog-friendly cafe, dog-friendly microbrewery or dog-friendly dog grooming parlour on every street corner; the dads of the kids at the local schools all do pick-up and all have opinions about cycling and the best low-alcohol beer; people are prosperous, polite and earnest about correctly disposing of food waste.
Here's the problem: Britain is allowing in, indeed welcoming in, millions of people from the Third World, people who have no notion of assimilating, of becoming British, or of giving up their Third World attitudes and behaviors. And the "nice" British are allowing it to happen. But more to the point, it's no longer just the immigrants, legal or illegal, who are slipping away from the "nice" Britain, who are abandoning the social standards and morality that made Britain what it was, and what it is no longer.
This all leads us to eschew law, the essence of which is making rules and enforcing them. Why, our governing class wonders, would one need as archaic and quaint a thing as rules, with consequences for breaking them, if one could just make sure everybody is nice? It is true that we are, as I have explained before, very good at creating judicial and regulatory processes which call themselves law. But these are in truth only exercises in creating discretionary powers for the executive to exercise, or judicial processes giving legal effect to what the judge had for breakfast. The idea that there is a right and a wrong, that public law ought to reflect this, and that consistent, significant consequences ought to flow from its breach, is a concept which is becoming increasingly alien to us.
The same thing is happening here in the United States. That's even more troublesome, because a quick look at what is happening in Europe and even Canada paints a worrisome picture of the United States as the last bastion of Western culture, of Western civilization, and even here, things are coming unglued. I've pointed out example after example in my Downfall of America's Cities series, and I will continue doing so, out of the hope that we may yet be able to turn this around.
It boils down to this: There is good in the world, and there is evil. These, too, are basic societal concepts that go back as far as human history; the ancient Greek scholars, thousands of years ago, wrote of the natures of good and evil. And the cautionary note is this: Good doesn't always win. Evil, when it is not answered by action, frequently wins out over good. That, too, goes far back in human history. There have to be consequences, not just for outright evil, but for the social aberrations that lead to it. The Daily Sceptic piece includes some troublingly familiar examples:
The examples and illustrations are legion. The woman convicted 171 times for shoplifting; the teenager who escaped a custodial sentence after killing a nine year-old girl with a knife; the child abusers given ludicrously short probation orders; the serial sex offender given serially lenient treatment until his murderous actions finally forced the judicial system to take proper action; the Albanian drug dealer given a suspended sentence because he now has a job and is “willing to put back into society“; the thug with an existing suspended sentence spared jail after further violent conduct because it would not have been “just” to imprison him; and so on.
Evil must be answered for. Justice must be done. In Britain, increasingly, it is not. In our American cities, increasingly, it is not. A look at a crime map paints that picture better, indeed, than a thousand words.
— Ward Clark (@TheGreatLander) September 1, 2026
The small things, unanswered for, turn into large things. In the 1990s, New York was for a time one of the world's safest major cities. The streets were clean. Crime was low. Law-abiding people walked safely on the streets, even at night. This was because, in large part, of the successes of Mayor Giuliani's broken-windows policies, which were largely continued by his successor, Michael Bloomberg. Then came the Democrat Bill de Blasio, and the Big Apple's decline resumed.
The bad part is that the spike in crime rates in these mostly Democratic jurisdictions is, as my colleague Kyle Becker recently pointed out, due to about one percent of the actual goblins, who somehow keep getting turned loose.
But it all begins with this subtle breakdown, the abandonment of public order, of expectations of civil behavior. It begins with petty infractions, like shoplifting, and accelerates. It begins with small crimes, small acts of evil, which embolden the goblins when they face little or nothing in the way of consequences. Then, they escalate, the result being the kinds of behavior we see too often in our major cities today.
Evil must be answered for. Justice must be done. At every level, small and large.
The only purpose of government is this: Protecting the liberty and property of the citizens. That's all. And, today, all too often, all of our levels of government are failing.
