# I Love Government

*What I've Been Thinking About Lately #86*

By [WIBTAL](https://wibtal.com) · 2026-04-26

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Bashing government is popular because it's painfully relatable. Everyone has had a bad experience at the DMV, in a permit office, or with a tax form. I too enjoy a good bash as one of my [recent WIBTALs](https://wibtal.com/84) was a government complaint. But like most complaining, it's fixating on the part that sucks while ignoring everything else.

It's like the "If only I had X, I'd be happy" trap we fall in to with wanting more in our own lives. It ignores that you have two working legs, eat three meals a day, and can read. Without conscious effort, these things are taken for granted. Same thing with government. Nobody cares about the trash getting picked up, the streets getting plowed, or the water being drinkable. These massive logistical feats are invisible until they stop working. Strangers built all of it, for other strangers, organized by government.

For most of human history, strangers were threats. You trusted your tribe and killed outsiders. You couldn't use anything beyond what your clan could build with their hands. For better or for worse, government issued money is the current technology that lets strangers trust each other.

Strangers trusting each other is important because it makes us all richer. It lets us build things no tribe could build alone: highways, power grids, the internet, vaccines, satellites. Things that need millions of hands and decades of coordination.

So while government is bloated, slow, and full of people I'd never hire, I love it anyway. Not the politicians or the parties, but the boring machinery underneath that keeps us from killing each other over water.

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*Originally published on [WIBTAL](https://wibtal.com/86)*