Republicans contend that big government doesn’t work and the Democrats prove them right whenever they have power. Or, as I often told my kids, the Democrats need to be in power every now and then, so people can recall, Oh, so this is why my Old Man always said that he would sooner chew his right arm off than vote for a Democrat again.
Old Lesson Learned Anew
Donald R. McClarey
Cradle Catholic. Active in the pro-life movement since 1973. Father of three, one in Heaven, and happily married for 41 years. Small town lawyer and amateur historian. Former president of the board of directors of the local crisis pregnancy center for a decade.
“Example is the school of mankind and he’ll learn at no other.” -Edmund Burke
It’s too bad that many of the Republicans over the last twenty years have forgotten that big government doesn’t work when they are the ones in power.
I miss The Donald.
Bart Simpson: Grandpa, didn’t you think it was odd you were getting money in the mail for no reason. Abe Simpson: I thought the Democrats were back in power.
I’ll dissent. ‘Big government’ is a nonsense term. The problem isn’t that ‘big government’ ‘does not work’. It’s that the intrusion of public agency financed by tax collections (or public corporations financed by service charges) into realms which can be served by competitive private enterprise makes things worse than they would otherwise be. Its that public agencies for which recruitment, promotion, and / or employee discipline are not practiced to further the overt institutional mission of the agency make things worse than they would otherwise be. It’s that law codes and regulatory codes not subject to regularly scheduled barnacle-scraping make things worse than they would otherwise be. It’s that crony capitalism and crony philanthropy make things worse than it would otherwise be, whether the condit is direct grants, no bid contracts, tax preferences, or regulatory sluicing. It’s that manufacturing pseudo-professions through government certification and licensing make things worse than they would otherwise be.
Big government is a descriptive term Art. The bigger the government the less accountable it will be to the voters, the more power that will be exercised by bureaucrats accountable to no one and the more government will impose its will in the most minute aspects of life. It is a plague.
Big government is a descriptive term Art.
It’s a butter knife, not a scalpel.
The bigger the government the less accountable it will be to the voters, the more power that will be exercised by bureaucrats accountable to no one and the more government will impose its will in the most minute aspects of life. It is a plague.
Except the problem is not its ‘bigness’ per se. The postal service is often a disappointment, but it’s not a problem unless you’re in one of those glacially paced queues. The problem we have is the use of public agency without necessity (and pubic primary and secondary schools are a sterling example) precludes exit as a disciplinary mode. On top of that, we have modes of government finance which compromise accountability, the officious judiciary further compromising accountability, and the the obsessive impulse of federal legislators to stick their fingers in every pie. Franklin Roosevelt made use of the term ‘co-operative federalism’ and Lyndon Johnson ‘creative federalism’ (wherein the malignancy spread everywhere). Both the Nixon and Reagan administrations made attempts at sorting functions between different levels of government. After Reagan’s departure, Republican pols forgot about it.
Thank God the American people are beginning to pierce the blizzard of lies and realize the government seizes too much of their money and then [partly inadvertently] uses it to make their lives worse.
The main reasons for government failure are obvious: human fallibility and the fact that the government serves the interests of K Street, connected billionaires, career crooks’ [politicians, e.g., the Joe crime family] interests not those of we the people.
Art Deco would argue with a fence post, as my father used to say.
Ronald Reagan was right! Government is the problem. Not the solution.