The Fire of Hell

This from Dallas Stephens:

What began as a few dollars per year in taxes for roads & schools soon grew to include streetlights, sidewalks, alleys, utility services, police, jails, courts, parks, libraries, hospitals & business parks. And of course, each of these 'services' involved hiring people to run & maintain all of them -- and new offices, administrators, attorneys, inspectors, bosses and their bosses.

Now, here we are, paying taxes out the wazoo for the unlimited stuff that we can't afford anymore. That means some of the stuff gets trimmed from the budget by our elected leaders (either overtly or covertly).

And, of course, that causes lots of division between the masses, because everyone's got their own favorite 'service / benefit' that don't want to see get cut. Tis always better to cut someone else's stuff than our own.

That's why cities always try to attract new people and new employers, as if sharing the costs between more people isn't offset by the fact that the new people also need services & stuff from government too. Tis what it tis.
Humans always think that collectives like government can solve all of our common problems, without realizing that collectives always end up causing more problems than they solve. Sort of like using Roundup to kill our weeds, then discovering that it also kills the people who use it.

Lastly, there's the inevitable inflation that's caused by central banks that print too much money that's used to pay for everyone's stuff. Sad though that each newly printed dollars always lowers everyone's purchasing power over time. So, taxes have to keep going up, because it takes more dollars to pay for the new stuff you want, plus the debt on the stuff you got last year.

Yeah, tain't no different where one lives. Everyone eventually gets stuck with the bill for all of the new stuff we want + all of old stuff we gave to ourselves in the last 100+ years.

Tim adds:

Government is a false god. I once pointed that out to a frothing at the mouth liberal who replied "yeah but it works!" Like it really works! But he saw it as the mechanism to make all dreams come true. How do you maintain a society where people think that government is the key to happiness?

Government creates nothing. It is a parasite, a user that sucks the life out of the public. Yes, some people benefit, as the bacteria benefit when a body dies, but in the end even that bacteria dies. There is a sweet spot that lasts for a short time where everything seems to be going good, with a balance between government and the private sector. But that is short-lived.

Government keeps growing and the private sector shrinking and you lose the balance. Eventually you will probably collapse as the top-heavy system is unwieldy and corrupt.

There is a reason why the word Byzantine means overly complex and non-responsive and is a pejorative; the Byzantines followed this trajectory and wound up unable to resist the Turks and others who were not so wrapped up in the tentacles of "public services". Sadly America now makes Byzantium look like Laissez Faire capitalism. We will meet similar ends.

You can only draw so much oil from the well. We are trying to run all of California off one well, and when that dries up adding water to it. We are in the water stage now and wondering why our engine of state's performance isn't what it used to be. Well duh!

We have all now been baptized in the waters of governmental authority. And we are now out of gas.

And the more money and power the government acquires the more people worship it as a god. The Romans did that. So did many other ancient peoples.

And so did the Fascists. Mussolini is quite instructive to read. His "The Doctrine of Fascims" makes it clear he wanted to substitute the People for God and the State for the Church. He understood that people need religion and so he gave them a secular one. And, as my liberal friend says, "it worked" but only for a short time.

Government cannot ultimately answer the big questions, or be fair to everyone. It is a collective of individual wills that balance each-other out, and the will of those best connected, best organized, best financed will then be the ruling will. Corruption is inevitable when all this money and power are involved.

Which is precisely why the Founding Fathers sought to decentralize and counterbalance everything. They realized government was needed but not desirable. They hoped the People would be the rulers of themselves.

But immediately people like Alexander Hamilton sought to empower government over the individual and that movement has been ongoing ever since. The Civil War was fought in no small measure against this rising statism. And now we are reaching the point of being a police state, and we will soon be a totalitarianism. That is the progression of government.

George Washington said government is like fire; a dangerous servant and a fearful master. We should have listened to him. Shoot; he should have listened to him and rejected the efforts of Alexander Hamilton at the time.

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 10:01 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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