Big Bad Government – It’ll Huff & Puff & Blow Our House Down

Follow the Prager University link to the right to the short video clip on "The Bigger the Government..."

Bigger government is bad in many ways, and the Obama administration’s trend is clearly in that direction. 16,000 new IRS agents alone just to help enforce Obamacare. Other new beaurocrats to administer that and new regulatory commissions. For the first time in history, there are now more government union (SEIU) workers than private sector/manufacturing union members in the U.S.

And the Obama administration seems bent on manufacturing (e.g., thru Congressional show trials/hearings) or worsening one crisis after another – a crisis du jour -- to provide the excuse for further government growth/intervention to address the problem. As that prince of darkness, Rahm Emanuel said, “You should never let a crisis go to waste” – it’s an opportunity to do what you ordinarily couldn’t. And we have yet to reverse any government bureaucracy – they only grow.

Let's examine how bigger government is bad economically, morally & for our liberty.

Economically

Recent Prager guest, Peter Schweitzer of the Hoover Institution, authored the book, “Architects of Ruin: How big Government Liberals Have Wrecked the Global Economy, and How They’ll do it Again, if No One Stops Them.” Government produces nothing anyway, GDP-wise. And with the number of non-tax-paying U.S. citizens at 45% (representation without taxation for them, taxation without representation for the rest of us), and projected to grow to 55% in the next few years, there’s a whole huge majority entitlement class that can continue to vote themselves more benefits at the expense of the minority who actually earn and pay taxes. Clearly unsustainable.

Unlike Greece (where government employs over 30% of workers) & Italy, teetering on economic collapse in the EU, the more economically secure EU governments like Germany & France are moving away from big government, and are privatizing. They’ve learned the lessons of big government. Just as Obama rushes to follow the example of Greece, that failed to learn that lesson in time. And a bailout of Greece will affect us directly, as it’s not just the EU but the IMF that is impacted, and we are the largest contributor to the IMF (3 times the next largest). More bailouts to pile on our national debt, and a loan at least as bad as the bad mortgages, and that we’ll likely never get back.

And Obama needn’t even look as far as Greece – the same models apply here in teetering California and Los Angeles, both with bloated government staffs, and business-unfriendly taxes and regulations that drive out the tax base. California has among the highest income & sales taxes in the nation, and similarly high (12.9%) unemployment. The Millikan Institute Found California is suffering a collapse of its manufacturing sector on the magnitude of the one that killed Michigan’s economy. CA’s longterm job losses: since 2001, 634,000 factory jobs disappeared along with 34% of the industrial base; from 2003-7, 79,000 jobs were lost due to excessive regulation and too high taxes. The government sector grows as the private sector shrinks – they’re antithetical. Schwarzenegger once styled himself a conservative, but recently has come out in support of Obamacare, legalizing marijuana and cap in trade tax, and now opposes drilling off the state’s oil rich coast. And it turns out a significant factor in LA’s financial woes was the DWP’s high cost for government-mandated green energy development.

Those Greek government workers retire at 55 with full pensions paid for by the burden on the productive private sectors of the economy. And Greece did not follow the conservative, budget-balancing tactics of the more secure EU governments, but rather spent its way into deep debt, unsustainable with higher taxes as the private sector cash cow was milked dry. Their deficit is at least 100% of GDP -- ours was 50% before Obama, now 70% and projected shortly to be 90%, right up there with Greece.

A twenty-something Greek woman rioter proclaimed, “why should I be burdened with the debts and mistakes of the previous generation?” Where is that wisdom and spirit in our younger generation here? Instead they blindly follow the narcissistic leftist pablum fed by their leftist professors, and as George Mason U., cheer Obama wildly when he proclaims they can remain on their parents’ health care plans to age 26. It will be a rude awakening for them.

Carter’s progressive Community Reinvestment Act was not a big problem until Clinton supercharged it , and bad, low-income loans through Fannie Mae & Freddie Mac jumped by $4.2 trillion from 2000 to 2008. Those loans were 6 times as likely to fail as mortgages with conventional requirements. And fail, they did, bringing down the bad, newly-invented investment derivatives that had bundled those bad mortgages. For all their scapegoating of Wall Street and coming up with new regulatory provisions, the Democrat Congress has completely sidestepped the Fannie & Freddie problems that precipitated the whole economic collapse. They’re like poor excuses for doctors who only treat the symptoms and not the cause. But of course they wouldn’t want to do anything that might jeopardize their leftist social engineering – damn the economic consequences.

The Left does not build, but rather leaches off those who have built, sapping the strength of those who build, and eventually bringing them down. This applies to wealth, Boy Scouts, morals, etc. – and literal buildings in the case of extremist Muslims. Bailouts are not free market capitalism, but government subsidization of gambling risk.

Morally

Big government breeds corruption. Big government has and wields power, power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely, as seen in every totalitarian regime. In any government, there is no competition for government services, and secure civil service employment, so little incentive to produce. With that lack of incentive, and time on their hands, apparently a fair number of SEC personnel had plenty of time to view pornography on government computers at work, while missing the Bernie Madoff Ponzi scheme. And they missed the bad investment derivatives bundling bad mortgages from the Fannie & Freddie Community Reinvestment Act progressive social engineering that triggered the entire economic meltdown and recession. Their hero is no doubt Nero, fiddling as Rome burned.

The SEIU government workers union apparently is rife with corruption and thuggery, and undue political influence that votes for those who support more government jobs and benefits – a vicious cycle. Interesting that the SEIU says they can tolerate unemployment – as long as we’re all suffering – it’s equality that’s important to them. To say nothing of the frequent scandals of many-term Congressmen secure (and unmotivated) in their gerrymandered districts.

And then there is increasing government encroachment on our religious & speech liberties, courtesy of their obeisance to the ACLU-fostered lawsuits on behalf of the non-religious and politically correct. We continue to move in the direction of Europe, where in England a minister was arrested for saying that homosexuality was against God’s word in the bible, and thereby disturbing the public order. What is considered illegal hate speech in various European countries (& Canada, as Ann Coulter learned) continues to grow. Their superficial moral high ground and egalitarianism is a thin veneer, however. They are quick to avoid offense of Muslim extremists, who they fear may actually hurt them, and very tolerant or even supportive of attacks against Christians, who they know very well will not.

And bigger and more bureaucrats will improve things, rather than become even more unmanageable and unaccountable? What wonderful models of service, quality, productivity, efficiency and self-sustainability are the post office, DMV, SEC, public education, etc.

Liberty

Congressmen, beaurocrats and activist judges feed off of fanning the flames of the cause du jour, and further regulating the details of our lives “for our own good.” They do this by enlisting and manipulating the gullible and indolent masses seeking to be cared for by the nanny state – that is the constituency that keeps them in power. Their devious foot in the door in Obamacare is admittedly just a step towards a single-payer system that will totally control our health care choices, and that most experts agree will diminish the quality of care (e.g., the Canadian PM who came to the U.S. for surgery).

Taking more of our money in taxes clearly reduces our discretionary (including charitable) spending and hence options of what we can do with our lives – taking away free agency that has been fought so hard for. Providing more of our services by government bureaucracy reduces our choices, as does government regulations of corporations now largely owned by the government (e.g., what kind of cars & loans that must be made).

And they are quick to attribute the vilest motives (e.g., racism) to conservatives, in order to shut down their speech against a black president’s policies, or illegal immigration. Bill Clinton recently tried to quash conservative dissent by warning of ominous violent consequences. And there are those like Mayor Blumberg of NYC who are all too ready to subscribe to that – his voiced suspicion after the Times Square car-bombing attempt was that it could well be someone (tea-partyer) disgruntled over Obamacare or bailouts. And even after the Pakistani, confessed Taliban-trained perpetrator was in hand, CNN anchors were wondering what could have provoked him – financial difficulties? Back to the Leftist-Marxist reflex of all coming from economic & materialistic motivation – ignoring other values. More people have been losing homes than ever before, and you don’t see them in the news blowing people up. Mustn’t think (and certainly not say) it could possibly be some Muslim extremist, as in the vast majority of cases. Oh, that’s right, the great Obama continues to avoid such terms. Maybe if we ignore the obvious, it will go away.

In my April 2 posting, I cited a number of choice quotes by Thomas Jefferson (founder of the Democrat Party) who abhorred bigger government and enumerated several of the negative consequences of it.