Culling Country
Email This Post
Print This Post
Government is enjoying the fruits of your labor.
In a nation that produces lots of lucre, The People seem to have little of the stuff. The Occupy Wall Street crowd and other oddballs blame banks, though any honest reading of recent economic insanity insists that government is the culprit (as always). Our Feds bailed out buddies in banking instead of letting those who took risks take haircuts. Yet this masks the major underlying source of our fiscal flailing.
In bygone days when government performed only essential services and before the Supreme Court devolved America into a mere democracy, government at all levels ate a respectable 9% of national income, with the bulk being spent at the state and local levels (which is a smart system because local politicians are easier to tar and feather, and thus tend to be more obedient). Today your public “servants” suck 45% of America’s life blood, mainly at the federal level, leaving the people paupers. Women’s liberation allowed women to leave the home and find jobs, which they had to do because no one-income family could survive the newly engorged tax burden (click the chart to engorge it).
Unquestionably, there is progress. The average American now pays out twice as much in taxes as he formerly got in wages.
The cost of inappropriate regulation simply amplifies our situation into an elaborate form of slavery.
Reversing the process is problematic because of the motivations of people involved (and by “people” I do not mean politicians, who lack standing in the human community). Three primary packs of profiteers pilfer via government. First and least worrisome are government workers, who like the rest of us, want good jobs that pay well. The problem is that government employees help elect their bosses, and thus fight harder than wounded wolverine when budget cuts are proposed. Have a look at recent Wisconsin wars whereby teachers skipped class to scream in television camera lenses in failed attempts to forestall reduced job profitability.
If I could elect my supervisors, I would have never quit my day job.
So-called capitalist are the next band of bandits. Most insane legislation – such as the prohibition against interstate selling of health insurance – is designed to benefit large corporations. Most inane spending programs – such as the everlasting Osprey aircraft, forced upon an unwilling military in order to enrich one Senator’s state – benefits corporations who otherwise would be forced to produce something of real value. Like public employees campaigning for candidates who will protect their jobs, corporations and trade groups solicit specie and create free income.
Which explain why World War II mohair subsidies live longer than vampires (and both classify as blood suckers).
Bank bailouts and similar stunts are outright theft, as is welfare, performing arts grants and congressional pensions. No need for me to elaborate on the nature of theft except to say that horse thieves are normally dangled from tall trees, which makes for good public policy and should be expanded beyond equine misappropriation.
With so many groups effectively encouraging corrupt government, reversing the trend seems Sisyphean. Yet any cowboy with multiple saddle sores can attest that one good way to thin herds is to first split them. Separating one steer from the pack creates a smaller and less defensible herd. Penning one cow at a time eventually assures all get slaughtered. The process starts by targeting the weakest first, who the rest of the pack sacrifices to save themselves. Once thinned, the others become easy picking, or willingly walk into the coral out of herd instinct.
Thieves may be the best initial target. Aside from thieves themselves, everybody resents theft. Though we all have different ideas about whom the biggest thieves are, it is easier to unify various ideological factions to cut the cancer of blatant theft from the body politic. Defining theft as drawing from public coffers without providing necessary products and services, and including all such forms of theft therein, sets the stage for popular (and I hate to say it, populist) force. Adding corporate profiteers, subsidized farmers and welfare recipients into the same pen sets the stage for thinning the three headed herd by one.
If managed well, savings reenter the economy and start growing private sector jobs, which will be necessary because the next cows to be culled are public employees. Government pays a lot of people to do unnecessary and damaging work. The Energy Department – whose original mission was to make America energy independent, and in which it has utterly failed – employs about 109,000 people (including contractors) to mismanage America’s primary tool of economic growth. The Agriculture Department – charged with helping farmers do what they have for several thousand years – pays nearly 106,000 head, including administrators who subsidize goat herders to maintain their flocks in case we need to make wool overcoats for soldiers.
All told, Uncle Sugar salaries 1,430,000 people outside of the military and the postal service (and given how many postal workers go gun crazy, perhaps we should shift them from one branch of government to another). Lopping off the first million would suffice.
Capping capitalists suckling at your financial teat then becomes an automatic action. Eliminating entire federal departments and their bulging staffs also eliminates their spendthrift authority. It also becomes easier to identify and eliminate unauthorized expenditures that do not address departmental tasks. Yes, Congress might devise more direct ways to propel pork to constituent corporations, but it won’t be easy as the machinery of government becomes more narrowly defined, perhaps back to its original enumerated list of responsibilities.
Repeat at the State level.
Split the herd and eat the weakest first … at a dinning table next to the barbed wire fence. This way all the other cattle accept their eventual fate.
Comments