Catholic Fundamentalists understand that one of the first functions of any government is to build streets. As soon as streets are needed, someone will emerge to “take charge”. Taxes, or labor, will be confiscated to build them. After people have streets, their government’s second, and more enduring, function emerges. It must keep people off the streets. Babylonians forced tens of thousands to build huge irrigation works to keep people off their streets. Egyptians kept them busy building pyramids. Greeks erected temples. Romans, roads. The Chinese built walls and dug canals. Americans put a man on the moon. These activities kept people off the streets like never before. Wherever we travel, the most memorable things we see are all the ways that governments kept, and keep, their citizens off the streets.
People who roam around the streets make trouble. They have to be killed, enslaved, jailed, or be armed and sent to places to fight and kill other people who are being kept busy doing the same thing. The governments that don’t do that effectively are either destroyed by their own unemployed, or they are invaded and destroyed by the unemployed of other governments. So, governments learned that they had to have armed forces, to keep foreigners off their streets. At the same time they need police to keep their own people off their streets.
When governments fail in their prime mission, street control, wars begin. Governments that don’t keep their people busy, busy, busy are destroyed. Usually, their people end up being killed or enslaved.
Governments try to rely on “jobs” and “work” to keep people busy. But, people in freer countries are always trying to make money by inventing and making things to reduce the number of workers needed to do every private sector job that’s being done. When they invent dishwashers, clothes washers, dryers, vacuum cleaners, corn and cotton pickers, assembly lines, and robots, ever more people are made unemployed. So, governments invented schools, colleges, and universities to keep many who would otherwise be unemployed off the streets for whole decades of their lives.
Governments hate labor-saving devices, because they know that more people will have nothing to do. At the same time, inventions like machine guns, poison gas, and atomic bombs have the ability to quickly remove very large numbers of people from the streets. Governments whose people can invent and make things that rapidly remove people from the streets have a tremendous advantage, so smarter countries always provide encouragement to many of the smarter people inventing and making things.
It keeps them off the street, too.
