What is needed for a country, for its own protection and for its stable and efficient operation, most everyone will agree, is a strong government; but one which is constitutionally restricted to its proper and very limited role (basically to respond to the criminals who operate both within and from without a country's borders). The passing of laws (legislation), viz., the provision for the use of government force, is also to be constitutionally circumscribed. It is to be abhorred, whenever an individual in society is forced to give in to the desires of those who have set themselves up as knowing, Platonically, what is best for everyone else. The theory that the community is to permit government to use force with a view to uniting all its citizens and by so doing make them share together the benefits which each individually can confer on the community, for the benefit of the community -- while attractive in its statement, is a false theory; it is demonstratively an unworkable theory, which throughout history has been tried in practice, time and time again, and the result is always the same. A totalitarian state emerges and causes immense misery to all within the state. When, in its legislation, in its use of force, government suppresses the welfare of the individual; when its efforts are aimed to foster the attitude that one should not proceed to please oneself, government commits a fatal error in the achievement of its laudable object, the betterment of the whole. The essential problem in proceeding in this manner is that individuals cannot contribute to the whole, indeed will be a drain on the whole, unless they are allowed to be free and productive, that is to say allowed to suit themselves. Human beings are not robots; they did not come to possess the independent spirit, so characteristic of man, by serving others; a person is not a fixed entity; he came about through an evolutionary process; he is a superior being because of the exercise of free choice: and free choice continues to be essential to the individual's life and the life of a civilized community.