In every election cycle, some politician has stood before the people promising to make things better. Every now and then we are amazed to discover that he or she delivers on that commitment; most times, not. There are a lot of reasons why reform rarely results in real improvement: Inertia being the most formidable; stupidity, greed, corruption, avarice, cronyism, laziness insincerity, outright defiance and mutiny its squalid cousins. But when we assess the failure of government reforms in practical terms, it most often results from the error of addition.
Politicians usually get elected based either on hope or fear – hope for a better life, greater ease, more abundance, improved life-styles and a generally brighter future – or fear of a foreign enemy, a domestic enemy, disease, famine, natural disaster, or the most consistent: the opposing candidate. The innate defect in this strategy (in terms of reform) is that they all require government to do something. When government does anything it costs money, adds new government jobs, more bureaucrats, departments of hocus-pocus, czars, officers, restrictions, obligations; a host of newer, greater, higher, bigger, better government powers, agencies, interventions and contradictions.
Ronald Reagan observed: “Government is like a baby: An alimentary canal with a big appetite at one end and no sense of responsibility at the other.”
After 234 years of assembling this hurdy-gurdy monstrosity, government is an incomprehensible conglomeration of self-perpetuating exponentially expanding chaos; rendering ever diminishing value at ever-increasing cost. Everyone knows this. Everyone complains about it. Everyone wants it fixed (well, except for those whose meal ticket relies on its continuation). Everyone knows it has passed the point of sustainability.
As this leviathan has grown, it has sucked into its mounting gravity well an ever-growing segment of the private sector. Today and estimated 40 percent of Americans are dependent in some way on the government. Too many are entirely dependent. This makes real reform particularly difficult. It also speeds our descent into economic collapse while also increasing the likelihood that collapse when it comes will be catastrophic. Yet time and again, bill after bill, fix after fix, mounting studies, commission reports and the impartial accounting reports of the Congressional Budget Office, the Office of Management and Budget and the Government Accounting Office; the “reforms” fail to reform anything. In most cases they actually add to the cost, size, scope and invasive powers of the government – all in the name of reform.
"The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws." Tacitus
At some point – hopefully while we still have two dimes to rub together – we must face the inevitable conclusion that “reform” as we have known it, will only perpetuate the status quo; the continued irresponsibility that has brought us to the brink of economic collapse and unabashed authoritarianism.
So, what do we do? Our only rational salvation is simple, yet difficult.
• We must drastically downsize.
• We must ruthlessly strip government down to its bare bones; return it to the basic security services: Military, police and courts.
• Simultaneously, we must reevaluate the roles that these entities have come to play in the last two centuries of wanton power lust.
There are two ways to approach this challenge:
• Cutting the government’s income and leaving legislators to find a way to operate essential services on drastically reduced revenues;
• Systematic wholesale deconstructing government agencies, cutting costs.
Either way, it’s going to be ugly – but not nearly as bad as the inevitable uncontrolled economic collapse and social chaos that will result from doing nothing.
"Cowardice asks the question: is it safe? Expediency asks the question: is it political? Vanity asks the question: is it popular? But conscience asks the question: is it right? And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor political, nor popular - but one must take it simply because it is right." - Martin Luther King, Jr.
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