The Government That Would Not Stop Itself
America is living through a story it has told itself before. The federal government expands into one domain, then another, and the people caught in the middle pay the price.
This week, two stories demand attention. The first is the ICE surge in Minnesota, where months of intensified immigration raids led to the deaths of two American citizens, Alexei Good and Alex Pretti. The second is the ongoing question of the Epstein files, where Attorney General Pam Bondi told Congress all documents were released, yet roughly 3 million pages remain in Justice Department hands. Both stories point to the same root problem: power, held by the state, with no real check and no real cost to those wielding it.
When Enforcement Becomes a Machine
Immigration enforcement is not a new idea. The desire to know who lives here and to set some rules around entry is as old as the nation itself. The Lovatarian view on immigration is not chaos. It is consent and voluntary order. When two parties agree to exchange labor and residency, that transaction deserves respect.
What happened in Minnesota was something different. Federal agents ran a large-scale operation. Protesters gathered, many of them nonviolent. Two citizens were shot and killed. And now, a federal investigation is stalled partly because the FBI refuses to share evidence with state investigators.
This is what happens when a government program runs at scale without feedback loops. A neighbor calling the city about a noise problem gets a response shaped by local accountability. Someone can lose their job over it. A federal surge operation moves with no such natural correction. It draws from budgets allocated by Congress, directed by appointees who serve the president. No individual agent faces the market consequences of an overreach. The system keeps running.
Voluntary communities have their own ways of setting limits. Neighborhoods organize. Employers choose who they hire. Churches and mutual aid networks help people in need. These systems fail sometimes, but they self-correct. The people running them feel the results directly. They see the person they helped, or the one they failed. That information changes behavior.
A federal operation feels none of this. Minnesota wound down only after months of protest, political backlash, and the deaths of two American citizens. That is a very slow and very costly feedback loop.
The Files We Were Promised
The Epstein case is a different kind of failure, but it shares a common ancestor. Democratic Representative after Republican representative stood before cameras and demanded transparency. President Trump campaigned on it. Voters expected it.
Pam Bondi told Congress all files were released. Three million pages apparently remain.
Republican Congressman Thomas Massie, who co-wrote the Epstein Files Transparency Act, said in a recent interview that he no longer has confidence in Bondi. The complaint is simple: the administration promised to be different and was not.
This is the oldest story in electoral politics. Candidates win by making promises their party cannot or will not keep once in power. They win 51% of the vote by telling that 51% what it wants to hear. Then they govern toward the interests of the people who matter most once the votes are counted.
A Lovatarian watching this situation is not surprised. Political solutions require winning elections. Winning elections creates incentives to divide and to promise. Those promises then collide with the realities of institutional power, which protects itself and its allies. The Epstein case is extreme in its particulars, but it is ordinary in its logic.
The voluntary world handles secrecy differently. A business that promises transparency and hides its records loses customers to one that tells the truth. A nonprofit caught concealing funds faces donors who walk. The consequences are not perfectly reliable, but they are real and they are fast.
The government faces no such check. Congress can hold hearings. Constituents can vote in two or four years. And in the meantime, the files stay locked.
What Voluntary Solutions Look Like
Neither story calls for a radical answer. The Lovatarian position is not that we need zero immigration policy or that no one should investigate sex trafficking networks. It is that the tools of compulsion are blunt and slow, and that they tend to expand beyond their intended use.
What can people do in a world where federal operations run without restraint and government officials break their promises without penalty?
Build parallel systems. Communities that provide mutual aid and sanctuary outside federal structures do not eliminate the problem, but they reduce individual exposure to its worst effects. People who help their neighbors directly, with housing and legal referrals and food, create the kind of dense voluntary network that makes coercion harder to apply at scale.
Demand transparency at every level, and support the private investigators and journalists who pursue it. The people who have gotten closest to the Epstein story in recent years were often reporters, independent researchers, and lawyers working outside the official framework. The government did not release this information freely. It was pulled out piece by piece by people who cared and kept asking.
Choose politicians, at every level, not on the basis of their promises but on the basis of their track record. A city councilman who kept one promise is worth ten senators who made twenty. Tight feedback loops require tight accountability, and that starts with the smallest elections where the margin between a promise and its fulfillment is visible.
The Long View
The deaths in Minnesota and the locked files in Washington are symptoms. The underlying condition is a political culture that treats government as a tool for winning rather than a limited structure for protecting basic rights.
Changing that culture takes longer than one election cycle. It happens when people choose community over partisanship, mutual aid over government programs, honest conversation over tribal loyalty.
That change starts today. It does not wait for 51% of the country to agree. One neighbor helping another is already the work.