I have absolutely had it with that whining, churlish segment of the population that thinks small government is the solution of all this country’s problems.
This is The United States. It’s a big country and it plays big on the world stage. You can’t run a big country that has big needs and big problems with small government. They did that very well in 1776 but that was a long time ago in a small country with small problems.
If you really want small government, then the U.S. just isn’t the right place for you, it’s like wanting to ski every day and buying a house in Florida. If you really need to live in a place that sports small government you should look into The Congo, Somalia, Burma or Haiti. The end result of small government speaks for itself; no infrastructure, no health care, no schools, no social security, no Medicare or Medicaid, no unemployment insurance, none of the things the Tea Baggers scream for, have come to expect, but for which they don’t want to pay.
It doesn’t take a genius to understand that if you want social services you have to pay for them. It is obvious Greece has no geniuses. It’s just as obvious that the Bush administration didn’t either because they tried to run a big government, start two wars and reduce taxes all at the same time. This led to a zero national debt becoming a trillion dollar national debt. Is any of this making sense?
That is not to say that our big government is working optimally. The big push against incumbents in congress has a basis in real dissatisfaction but that is a condemnation of the individuals rather than the system. It’s also a condemnation of the voters who put those individuals in office and the fact that they never seem to learn. It isn’t the pretty face, or the facile speaker or the clown who supports your most heinous, bigoted notion that should be elected. It’s the guy who has good ideas, ideas that will promote the national good and who has shown an ability to get things done.
Up until now many conservatives thought that the mantle of big government should have been taken up by big business but we have just seen any number of convincing illustrations, including Haliburton stealing from the military, the mortgage scandals at the banks, the securities double dealing by Wall Street or the way BP protects our coastline, to think there’s any possibility of that concept working.
While it isn’t really doing very well now, I think the system we’ve got can work a hell of a lot better than anything else. What we have to do is filter out the dumb and the crooks. Who are the dumb and the crooks? Well the crooks are, for the most part, lobbyists who seek to influence our legislators to vote for bills that are not in the best interests of their constituents. Why does that make them crooks, let me give you an example.
This week congress passed a bill limiting banks in the collection of fees for transactions on debit cards. As would be expected, the banks fought this furiously. But their lobbyists threatened congressmen by telling them that their banks would withhold donations to their re-election campaigns if they voted the wrong way. Thank God that there were enough honest congressmen who voted for the bill and it passed but the point is that threatening to withhold donations is the same thing as offering a bribe. These lobbyists are felons and need to be treated as felons. They should be joined in jail by those greedy legislators who actually take the bribes. Removing those two crooked elements from our government would go a long way to making it work.
The dumb are those citizens who think they can get a free ride. You want roads, they cost money, you want good schools, they cost money, you want great health care, it costs money, just like your singlewide or the vacation you took at Mohegan Sun. The government gets that money for the amenities we need from taxes.
I know, you hate taxes, we all do but some of us realize that they have to be paid if we want the things that a civilized society expects from its government, things like clean water, functional sewers, navigable roads and good medical care. One of the reasons that our country has fallen down on some of these requirements is that we pay far less taxes than most civilized countries. You get what you pay for and we just don’t pay enough. Nobody likes that concept but it’s a reality.
There it is. Ultimately our system is very fair. Those who can afford to pay the most do, those who can’t afford to pay much pay very little… or nothing. That’s what fair is but of course there are too many greedy suckers out there who only care about what they can do for themselves. They’re the problem. They are the ones who are hurting our country. Mostly they are the people who keep screaming about getting their country back. What they really want is their country and yours too.