Why are we such suckers for government?
That question, and variants of it, has bothered me for a long time. In my two previous articles about city government, I hope I made it clear how even low-level city council members become almost god-like. They have the power to cause a lot of trouble, and they can just as easily dole out goodies to a favored few.
I'm not excluding myself from the term "suckers" either... I was, in my distant youth, a "liberal" who believed that government was "the answer" to curing our ills. Even worse, I was a grand-scheme liberal, believing that we should just "make it so" with a big WHOMP on the public, whether they liked it or not... because planners know best. You would be right if you suspect that I wanted to be one of those planners. Much later, I've decided that I would have felt right at home in Germany of 1935, and Hitler's grand plans would have appealed to me.
That grand-scheme young man still resides within me. I can feel the tendency... the idealistic belief that we can force the world into goodness. If I had the power of George W. would I fall prey to that tendency? Would I come to think, with the urgings of others, that I could reform the world into a better place... that I could save the world in spite of themselves?
Luckily for all of you, I'm intellectually in control of that tendency, but it isn't a simple tendency to keep in check. Our society pushes the idea that we can do anything we set our minds to, and promotes it with great bravado, testosterone, and idealistic blind faith. We have been a hugely successful nation, and we've developed a collective ego to match our success. We've become accustomed to believing that our national riches plus a can-do attitude can accomplish anything. Even failure does not long deter us... we make excuses, rewrite history, or just conveniently forget.
Having German ancestry (along with 43 million other Americans), and that grand-planner tendency, I've learned to question government with even more care than I give to buying anything else. I know, for example, that if I shop for a new car, I can choose from hundreds of models and not likely have bad results. I know that I can shop at any supermarket and be assured that the food will be good and that the price differences will be minimal. I can now change phone carriers without a hitch to save a few bucks, buy gas anywhere without worrying about quality or price, and so on. We have the luxury of choice, thanks to COMPETITION between providers of goods and services. Even more startling, in those areas LEAST regulated, our choices really become spectacular... as in electronic goods... cheap but powerful computers, cellphones, PDA's, etc. An aging geek can't even keep up with the change. My kids keep telling me "Dad, you can get a DVD player for $40"! Occasionally, I still buy LP (that's short for long-playing) records.
When we have choices, we investigate them. We pick favorite places to shop and buy, and real shoppers know the best place to buy any individual item. Government is a different story. We don't have a choice. Once we've picked a place to live, we're stuck with ONE local and ONE state government, and the feds come down on all of us. Because we don't have any choice of government, we come to ignore it and hope for the best.
The lack of choice handicaps government itself. The two major parties have colluded to make election competition almost impossible, so no matter how dissatisfied we might get, we're left to choose between the Demopubs, Republicrats, and others who are handicapped to the point of having no realistic chance.
If YOU were completely secure in your job... no chance of failure, no chance of layoff, with others begging for your support and offering money and favors in return for it, do you think you would do a great job? I doubt it... The temptation to goldbrick or become corrupted would be (and is) too great to expect of most people... especially people who planned much of their lives to get INTO those positions for precisely those returns.
The result is government that is geared to drive in almost exclusively bad directions, with almost universally bad results. Because there are just two major parties, they pretend to have differences, and wax eloquent in order to maintain parity between them... a sort of unspoken sharing of the spoils. Although both parties have their cheerleaders, most of them have financial incentive to choose one side over the other. Billions of our tax dollars are spent to get us to make "choices" that don't even result in change, much less improvement.
Our government, at all levels, has become steadily larger and uglier over my lifetime. Political leaders I thought were bad 40 years ago look good by comparison with what we have today. Our Constitutional guarantees are violated with regularity and impunity. Our courts have become politicized to the point that we cannot even count on justice if we go to the expense and pain of bringing suit against government. Government continues to become more intrusive... our privacy is now a joke, and our homes are no longer our personal castles. Our government has become hated around the world, and it is rubbing off on us.
The world believes that America is a free country... that the people are still in charge... and that makes US responsible for the actions of our government. That SHOULD be true, but it isn't, because we have ignored our responsibility to keep our government in check, and to insure our own rights. We, as a nation, have largely abdicated our citizenship by allowing ourselves to be suckered by government.
We SHOULD be angry. If a business, or even a friend, treated us the way our own government does, most of us would be screaming mad. Instead, we shrug, mutter "Darn", accept what seems to be inevitable, and go back to work.
Bad government is not quite inevitable, but we are approaching the point of no return. We are dangerously close to having NO remedy to out-of-control government... government that can easily become what the German people faced in the 1930's. Our nation had a clean start just 230 years ago... a start that was the envy of the planet, but in that short time, we have become the "bad guys"... the current bullies of the globe. Will Americans get off their cellphones long enough to pay attention and take some remedial action?
I'm not excluding myself from the term "suckers" either... I was, in my distant youth, a "liberal" who believed that government was "the answer" to curing our ills. Even worse, I was a grand-scheme liberal, believing that we should just "make it so" with a big WHOMP on the public, whether they liked it or not... because planners know best. You would be right if you suspect that I wanted to be one of those planners. Much later, I've decided that I would have felt right at home in Germany of 1935, and Hitler's grand plans would have appealed to me.
That grand-scheme young man still resides within me. I can feel the tendency... the idealistic belief that we can force the world into goodness. If I had the power of George W. would I fall prey to that tendency? Would I come to think, with the urgings of others, that I could reform the world into a better place... that I could save the world in spite of themselves?
Luckily for all of you, I'm intellectually in control of that tendency, but it isn't a simple tendency to keep in check. Our society pushes the idea that we can do anything we set our minds to, and promotes it with great bravado, testosterone, and idealistic blind faith. We have been a hugely successful nation, and we've developed a collective ego to match our success. We've become accustomed to believing that our national riches plus a can-do attitude can accomplish anything. Even failure does not long deter us... we make excuses, rewrite history, or just conveniently forget.
Having German ancestry (along with 43 million other Americans), and that grand-planner tendency, I've learned to question government with even more care than I give to buying anything else. I know, for example, that if I shop for a new car, I can choose from hundreds of models and not likely have bad results. I know that I can shop at any supermarket and be assured that the food will be good and that the price differences will be minimal. I can now change phone carriers without a hitch to save a few bucks, buy gas anywhere without worrying about quality or price, and so on. We have the luxury of choice, thanks to COMPETITION between providers of goods and services. Even more startling, in those areas LEAST regulated, our choices really become spectacular... as in electronic goods... cheap but powerful computers, cellphones, PDA's, etc. An aging geek can't even keep up with the change. My kids keep telling me "Dad, you can get a DVD player for $40"! Occasionally, I still buy LP (that's short for long-playing) records.
When we have choices, we investigate them. We pick favorite places to shop and buy, and real shoppers know the best place to buy any individual item. Government is a different story. We don't have a choice. Once we've picked a place to live, we're stuck with ONE local and ONE state government, and the feds come down on all of us. Because we don't have any choice of government, we come to ignore it and hope for the best.
The lack of choice handicaps government itself. The two major parties have colluded to make election competition almost impossible, so no matter how dissatisfied we might get, we're left to choose between the Demopubs, Republicrats, and others who are handicapped to the point of having no realistic chance.
If YOU were completely secure in your job... no chance of failure, no chance of layoff, with others begging for your support and offering money and favors in return for it, do you think you would do a great job? I doubt it... The temptation to goldbrick or become corrupted would be (and is) too great to expect of most people... especially people who planned much of their lives to get INTO those positions for precisely those returns.
The result is government that is geared to drive in almost exclusively bad directions, with almost universally bad results. Because there are just two major parties, they pretend to have differences, and wax eloquent in order to maintain parity between them... a sort of unspoken sharing of the spoils. Although both parties have their cheerleaders, most of them have financial incentive to choose one side over the other. Billions of our tax dollars are spent to get us to make "choices" that don't even result in change, much less improvement.
Our government, at all levels, has become steadily larger and uglier over my lifetime. Political leaders I thought were bad 40 years ago look good by comparison with what we have today. Our Constitutional guarantees are violated with regularity and impunity. Our courts have become politicized to the point that we cannot even count on justice if we go to the expense and pain of bringing suit against government. Government continues to become more intrusive... our privacy is now a joke, and our homes are no longer our personal castles. Our government has become hated around the world, and it is rubbing off on us.
The world believes that America is a free country... that the people are still in charge... and that makes US responsible for the actions of our government. That SHOULD be true, but it isn't, because we have ignored our responsibility to keep our government in check, and to insure our own rights. We, as a nation, have largely abdicated our citizenship by allowing ourselves to be suckered by government.
We SHOULD be angry. If a business, or even a friend, treated us the way our own government does, most of us would be screaming mad. Instead, we shrug, mutter "Darn", accept what seems to be inevitable, and go back to work.
Bad government is not quite inevitable, but we are approaching the point of no return. We are dangerously close to having NO remedy to out-of-control government... government that can easily become what the German people faced in the 1930's. Our nation had a clean start just 230 years ago... a start that was the envy of the planet, but in that short time, we have become the "bad guys"... the current bullies of the globe. Will Americans get off their cellphones long enough to pay attention and take some remedial action?
posted by Robert Ronald Smith at 1:51 AM
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