The Spectre of Big Government

Wouldn't it be nice to live in a nation where the government provides you with your every want... a place where all your needs are met by the benevolent bureaucrats who oversee every aspect of your life... a place where risk is eliminated through the almighty power of the state? Here's the problem, such a place cannot exist. The government cannot provide anything to you without first taking from someone else. The U.S. government produces no wealth, save for that which it confiscates from the great people of our nation in the form of taxes, tariffs, and fees.


There is nothing that government does better or more efficiently than private enterprise does. Government agencies, without exception that I have ever witnessed, are replete with all kinds of nauseating waste. The bureaucrats in our Federal Government have driven both Social Security and Medicare to the brink of insolvency, with bankruptcy a virtual certainty if no action is taken to correct the issue. Imagine if businesses were run like the federal government. Would you invest in a business that routinely spends considerably more money than it takes in? My suspicion is that you would not (at least not if you expected any kind of return on your investment). Nobody wants to invest money in a failed or failing venture. So why do we keep pouring money into the rathole that is the government?


A perfect example is government spending on education. We have been throwing more and more money at education for decades, with no real measurable improvement. Our education system is broken, especially in urban schools all over the country. And our attempt to fix the problem is to increase education funding, infinitely. But money alone cannot fix the problem. Not without the right policy solutions. I don't know what the answers are, but it would seem to me that building accoutnability back into the system would be an effective start.

If insanity is defined as repeating the same behavior and expecting different results, than what does it say about us that, in pursuit of higher quality education, not only are we repeating the same behavior, we are spending more to do so?

And since government can't even change a light bulb without commissioning an expensive, taxpayer-funded study about the best way to approach the task, than what business do they have telling me what type of light bulb I have to use in my own home? Or how many mile per gallon of gasoline my car must average? Or whether or not I can own a firearm? All of these little rules and regulations for "the greater good" amount to erosions of our freedom.

These people in Congress work for us. They need to be reminded of this fact (many of us need to be reminded of this fact as well). And it needs to be a blunt, unequivocal wake-up call. Stop voting for incumbents in any party who fail to take a hard-line stance on wasteful government spending and tax increases. If our taxes and the federal budget don't decrease during their term in office, vote them out of office. If our so-called leaders won't draw a line in the sand on federal spending, than let's draw it for them, with our votes. Sooner or later, they will get the message. They were not born into their positions by divine right... they serve in D.C. by the Grace and at the Will of the American People. They can either become part of the solution or they can get the hell out!