A few nights ago, I had dinner with a local Dallas restaurateur named Javier Gutierrez, the owner of Javier’s, which has been a legendary local institution since I was a boy. Javier has long struck me as embodying the virtues described in Baldassare Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier, published in 1528.
Polite but not too formal; always elegantly dressed in a jacket and tie but never flashy; calm, soft spoken and restrained but always open and friendly, he has a natural authority that instantly commands the respect of employees and customers alike. In our current sloppy, ill-dressed, hirsute, and tattooed era, it’s amazing how much respect a man can get just from being physically fit, well-dressed, and clean-shaven.
Like the ideal courtier described by Castiglione, Javier seems extraordinarily capable (of running an extremely busy restaurant) without having to exert himself.
I say this out of hard experience. I once tried running a restaurant and was astonished at how many things could go wrong in a single day.....
....Javier has had the exact opposite of my terrible experience. He opened his restaurant in 1977—serving Mexico City-Continental cuisine in an elegant, Spanish colonial atmosphere. By restaurant standards (making allowances for initial bumps at the start) it was an almost instant success, and it consistently provides a very nice living to his large and fiercely loyal staff.
“Have you ever had any trouble with employees behaving badly?” I asked.
“No, I treat them well, and they have always treated me well,” he replied.
“What about customers behaving badly—like getting drunk and brawling?”
“No,” he said. “We’ve never had any problems with customers, though we do reserve the right to stop serving someone if he’s had too much to drink.”
He mentioned that he has been approached by investors wanting to buy the restaurant. He owns the building, located on a very valuable parcel of land, and zoning would permit a high rise building on the footprint of his one-story restaurant.
“The real estate is worth more than the restaurant, but I could never sell it because I have way too many guys who work for me, many since the beginning.”
I mention Javier because his restaurant is an exemplar of what makes a civil society function. The whole community loves his restaurant, he employs dozens of people who use their excellent pay to take care of their families, and he makes a large annual contribution to the Dallas County coffers.
Javier grew up in Mexico City, and one of our topics of conversation was why Mexico had always struggled to develop its vast human and natural resources.
“It’s sort of mysterious, isn’t it?” he said. “There’s so much potential. I suppose a lot of it is because the Mexican state has always been dysfunctional and corrupt.”
This brings me to the main subject of this post—namely, the state.
We have grown accustomed to looking to the state to solve a vast array of problems, not realizing that it’s the state the causes most of them......
1). Keep bad guys off the street—i.e., respond to burglar alarms
2). Maintain the security of our national borders
3). Maintain critical infrastructure or strictly enforce regulations for maintaining it properly
4). Impartially adjudicate conflicts between citizens.
That’s it.
All of the other BS that we hear coming out of Washington—the constant need to manage and take care of everything and everyone and to act as the world’s policeman—is all a pretext for expanding state power.
I’ll conclude with a final reflection on my dinner with Javier. Everything about the man signals that he takes care of himself and his employees. If the American people want to remain free, they must fervently embrace the ethos of taking care of themselves and their families.
Whenever people fail to assume responsibility for taking care of themselves, tyrants will inevitably rush in to take care of things for them.
This is why, in recent decades, state and federal governments have expressed great sympathy for weak and dysfunctional people. Dependency on the state is synonymous with ceding power to the state.
A dependent people can never be a free people.
