A clean slate
That doesn't mean we don't have some pre-soiled options.
In the next few days states around the country will join Congress in cranking up their legislative branch after their holiday break. (In the states local to me, Delaware and Maryland, that break was about six months and nine months, respectively. I always called the Maryland session the “90 days of terror.”) All over the country we will be hearing proposals to have government do this or do that, spend this or spend that, but rare is the proposal to have government do less or spend less.
So, really, why is that?
Is it that government doesn’t trust you with your own affairs or is it the perception by people that they need the government’s assistance to live their lives?
If it’s the first answer, the solution is relatively simple: work to get those busybodies and nanny staters out of office and put people in who will work to rightsize government to a point where we can live our lives.
But if it’s the latter answer, it’s a little more problematic because we who know the real solution have a lot more edumacation to do. It’s a bit like mice who are conditioned to find their cheese in a certain place and are hopelessly lost when it suddenly isn’t there.
Many of us (myself included) are creatures of habit: we wake up at the same time in the morning and have a daily routine we follow in getting to work, a job where we do pretty much the same thing every day until we punch out at 5:00 and head home, expecting dinner to soon be on the table. One thing out of whack - a traffic jam, forgetting your lunch at home, some rush job with a looming deadline that makes you stay over - puts you into a bad mood.
Problem is, we come to expect the same from our friendly neighborhood government, and that’s what they want out of you. Just vote for them every two to four years. I don’t play that way.
Yes, government has functions they can do better than private enterprise, but more importantly government has functions that are spelled out in our founding documents that they must do. The issue is how much they ignore those things they are supposed to accomplish in order to do things they believe will keep them in power over you. Some of these “important” functions government does are redistrubute wealth to favored constituencies and grease the skids for particular interests to succeed at the expense of others. I talked about one example of skid greasing just before the holidays.
Since when was it the government’s place to dictate what kind of products you can buy? As long as they are used in a legal manner, no one should care whether you roll up in an F-150 or old-school Hummer or choose to buy a Tesla (without the government tax subsidies.)
And speaking of taxes, why is it that the government pays itself first? Let’s say I made $30 an hour for a 40-hour week. Shouldn’t my paycheck be $1,200 a week? Instead, I’m lucky to take home $900 after I have my interest-free loan to the government taken out, along with my contribution to the Ponzi schemes initially earmarked for my retirement and medical care but now yet another revenue source government can spend, and funds that similarly go to a state I don’t live in, which makes me file a form to get it back then decrees that it’s income I have to be taxed on.
That answer is simple: they can use that power to encourage me to spend and save my money in certain ways. Moreover, they have created a cottage industry of tax preparation which loves our complex system because they profit from it and keeps lobbyists who want even more red tape busy.
Yet if enough of us put our mind into changing the system, we could. The problem is the getting enough of us, because very few of us take the time to think these things through. Most would rather go along to get along, for which I don’t blame them: life is hard enough as is.
But would a little temporary inconvenience be such a bad thing? There’s an old song where Cinderella sings, “don’t know what you got until it’s gone.” My fear is that, given the trajectory we are on, we are just about to the point where the cheese will suddenly and mysteriously disappear and no one will have a clue what to do.
There’s a concept of managing the decline which people like to use when talking about the state of modern America. Since we have a clean slate right now, I’d like to turn that on its head and manage the decline of overreaching government. Are you in?