Dear Friends,
It seems to me, the worse a government program does, the more money, power and prestige it gets. That is the exact opposite of free enterprise. In free enterprise, those who fail get punished by the laws of the free market, while in government, failure gets a raise, promotion and a corner office. This is because the incentives for government and free markets are polar opposites. In government they are spending someone else money, with only themselves to hold themselves, accountable for it. If they fail at their goal this year they justify to themselves they need more money. With more money comes more employees and more employees means a larger fiefdom. If a government program were to succeed however, that leader would be laid off and her fiefdom dismantled. The incentives for bureaucrats then is to never solve any problem but indeed make them worse.
Crime is up so we are spending more to build a police state. The more our government fails in keeping us safe the more money we will be happy to give government to keep us safe. Even as our politicians give ever wider latitude to factions that are rioting in the streets, they call for more police powers, to stop the violent riots. We are plied with terror, of drugs, foreign powers and religious zealotry… to cajole us into giving the police state even more power. Laws and regulations are passed every day, constraining us in ways even a highly trained lawyer cannot fully comprehend, and so everyone is a criminal whether we know it or not, making the argument, you should only fear government intrusion if you are a criminal, moot. The more our government fails in keeping us safe the more power and money they get.
We face threats from across the globe and so we are spending more on defense. Our media is full of war propaganda now. Anyone who is not terrified, should be, or at least that is what the elite want us to think. Our government is moving troops, like chess pieces, across the globe as other governments do the same. The calls for war fill our nightly news and papers, all the legacy media in lock step… almost as if a single entity or person were calling the shots at them all. The elite tell us we are to believe that these problems just cropped up, that they came at us from the blue and the elite couldn’t have stopped them before. As I mentioned in blogs from the late 2000’s, the elite at the time were sowing the seeds for the next war, either intentionally or due to stupidity. Today those seeds are sprouting, proving the government has failed, once again, to keep global threats minimized… and so government will get more money and power to send our children to die in a war, the elite will never allow us to win.
Our schools can’t even teach our kids to read or make change anymore and so we are spending much more on education. Every year the US spends more on education, and every year the standardized tests have to be lowered, to make up for the lowered outcome. Students graduating high school today consistently score much worse in every measure than students from a decade ago, and they did far worse than students a decade before that. You cannot even compare the level of education of a high school student from the 1950s with today, the level of academic achievement required to graduate today is exponentially lower. That was then, this is now, however, and more failure by our government monopoly education system means more money, prestige and smaller class sizes.
The elite tell us that government spending is what keep sour economy afloat, and so we have to give more money to government, else our economy will collapse. The result is that out of fear of economic Armageddon, we transfer an ever growing percentage of our income to government, to spend virtuously to keep the economy going. Of course this is foolishness, since it is predicated on the idea we will not spend our money or save it. Moreover, the economy grows less and less every year, in the entire Obama Presidency for example, the US economy never exceeded 2%, which is far below historic norms of growth. Yet, since government is failing to stimulate the economy by taking more of our money, printing trillions and borrowing billions, to give to Wall street bankers, we must tax, print and borrow even more.
Perhaps the reason why government fails at everything it does is, the more it fails us, the more we give it. Even the benefit of the doubt. We hate to admit we have been swindled, but government swindles us all the time and we smile and open our checkbooks once again. It is a standing joke that the only form of immortality there is on this planet… is a government program. Every time government fails and we reward it for that failure we are doing ourselves, our children and even government itself, a grave disservice. Those government programs that have failed spectacularly need to be eliminated, they are not jobs programs for half witted bureaucrats unable to get a real job, they are supposed to be purposed programs dedicated to eliminating a societal problem. If they don’t succeed, they should be done away with and if they make that problem worse, as has the departments of Education, Energy, EPA, Bureau of Indian Affairs, ETC… the leaders should be punished as well. Fix the incentives and you have fixed government.
Sincerely,
John Pepin
