Its wholly mechanical processes, too rigid and too limited, cannot urge on enterprises which demand of whoever undertakes them delicate and safe handling, supple manipulation, appreciation of circumstances, ready adaptation of means to ends, constant contrivance, the initiative, and perfect independence.

On this account the State is a poor head of a family, a poor commercial or agricultural leader, a bad distributor of labor and of subsistence, a bad regulator of production, exchanges, and consumption, a mediocre administrator of the province and the commune, an undiscerning philanthropist, an incompetent director of the fine arts, of science, of instruction, and of worship.[2208] In all these offices its action is either dilatory or bungling, according to routine or oppressive, always expensive, of little effect and feeble in returns, and always beyond or apart from the real wants it pretends to satisfy.
The reason is that it starts from too high a point therefore extending over too vast a field.

Transmitted by hierarchical procedures, it lags along in formalism, and loses itself in "red-tape." On attaining its end and object it applies the same program to all territories alike a program devised beforehand in the Cabinet, all of a piece, without experimental groping and the necessary corrections; * a program which, calculated approximately according to the average and the customary, is not exactly suited to any particular case; * a program which imposes its fixed uniformity on things instead of adjusting itself to its diversity and change; * a sort of model coat, obligatory in pattern and stuff, which the government dispatches by thousands from the center to the provinces, to be worn, willingly or not, by figures of all sizes and at all seasons.
V.Final Results of Abusive Government Intervention Other consequences .-- Suppressed or stunted bodies cease to grow .-- Individuals become socially and politically incapable .-- The hands into which public power then falls.
-- Impoverishment and degradation of the social body.
And much worse.

Not only does the State do the work badly on a domain not its own, roughly, at greater cost, and with smaller yield than spontaneous organizations, but, again, through the legal monopoly which it deems its prerogative, or through its unfair competition, it kills and paralyzes these natural organizations or prevents their birth; and hence so many precious organs, which, absorbed, curbed or abandoned, are lost to the great social body .-- And still worse, if this system lasts, and continues to crush them out, the human community loses the faculty of reproducing them; entirely extirpated, they do not grow again; even their germ has perished.

Individuals no longer know how to form associations, how to co-operate under their own impulses, through their own initiative, free of outside and superior constraint, all together and for a long time in view of a definite purpose, according to regular forms under freely-chosen chiefs, frankly accepted and faithfully followed.