Less Government?

"POLITICIANS & DIAPERS NEED TO BE CHANGED OFTEN,
AND FOR THE SAME REASON"

The Tea Party is often described as a self-generated grass-roots protest against the growth of government and the resulting deficit. One commentator calls it the “Tea Kettle movement” — because “all it’s doing is letting off steam”. Well… Okay… I can agree with that to a point. The Tea partiers are letting off steam which, I suspect, is a good thing. We can all envision what happens when a boiler gets overheated and the safety valve is stuck. The results aren’t pretty. When that happens in a socio-political situation, the damage is widespread, long lasting, and really hard on society. A prime example would be the French revolution. The somewhat volatile French proletariat was bedeviled by a tax and spend government, the economy was a shambles, and the gentry ignored the anger building up. When the explosion came, French society crumbled, the gentry really did loose their heads, anarchy ruled the streets, and dictator’s filled the power vacuum. Eventually France got Napoleon and what was at the time “the Mother of all Wars”. With all that, the French political scene has yet to recover, having been in somewhat of a turmoil for the last two-hundred years! I’ll grant that we haven’t reached quite that extreme… yet, but there’s a lot of anger is building up. And that anger exists for many of the same reasons that happened in France. It’s building, and our leaders are blissfully ignoring the warning signs.

The issues that upsets the Tea Kettle, our debt and bloated government, are symptoms of the problem, not the cause. They’re signs of a country that’s in decline and losing its competitive edge. The first question that should be asked is; how does the leader of the free world, the richest and most successful country in history, come to this? And all that’s needed is to look at history. Rome was the military and economic power of the world a couple of thousand years ago, yet they deteriorated and fell to a few rag-tag bands of barbarians. The Chinese empire was a cultural and scientific power second to none, yet they simply disintegrated, and were soon swallowed piecemeal by a greedy world. The sun never set on the British Empire, yet in a few short years following WW I England went from being the worlds’ superpower to just another country. The Soviet Union was a super power, abit a somewhat shaky one, but they totally collapsed seemingly overnight. And now it appears to be our turn. How… Why…

The short answer is of course, debt, in every example government simply overspent their available resources. But that is not the root cause. The cause is, and has always been, a failure of leadership. In our case, politics has become just another form of entertainment, Congress a forum for legalized bribery, and our lawmaking institutions are divided by partisanship to the point of paralysis. The Tea Party folks, who run the full scale from Republicans through Independents to Democrats, understand this at a gut level wither they know it or not, and are fumbling around in the dark looking for a leader who can turn this sorry state of affairs around. Nor are they alone, as neither of the established mainstream parties have a leader worthy of the name.

First and foremost a political leader must have three characteristics. He must be a person who is more interested in fighting for his country than any particular political ideology. Second, he must be able to persuade Americans that he actually has a workable plan, not just some vague idea to cut taxes or hand everybody free medical care, but rather a plan to make America successful, thriving, and respected again. Thirdly, he must have the ability to lead in a rapidly changing world, an individual who believes his job is not to complain about the polls, but to change the polls by his actions. So what do we have today? The Republicans are effectively leaderless; there is no Teddy Roosevelt on their horizon. On the other hand, the Democrats have Mr. Obama, and about all I see him do is to whine about how tough things are and blame everything on somebody else. There’s no Truman or Kennedy of that front either. As for the TEA party, in its present state it doesn’t have a leader unless you count Sarah Palin. A more or less staunch conservative “party”, I have yet to see a Ronnie Reagan show up in their ranks.

So… all you wannabe political leaders, pay attention. It’s remarkable how the federal government imposes its will on a resistant public. True, it takes a lot to stir the American people to civil disobedience, but still, I’d think there aren’t enough bureaucrats and federal agents in all the land to impose the ridiculous and detailed rules the fed’s have forced on us, which should reminded us of just how destructive people can be when they grab political power, or when their “wisdom” is used by bureaucrats in some new scheme to “reinvent” government. More of anything when government is concerned only means more government, and more government is the problem, not the solution. The very fact that the best and the brightest among us feel the need to reinvent government every few years proves that such government doesn’t work. Government is not supposed to “provide” for us, it’s not supposed to control our lives, and nothing in the Constitution calls for “entitlements” either. “Government” is merely intended to be the lubricant that makes our society run a little smother. Despite the wistful thinking and fuzzy theories of the progressive left, the solution to our current crop of problems is a whole lot less government. How difficult can that be to understand?

A recent article in Fortune Magazine discusses the idea of reinventing our government into what they call “Government 2.0”, which is envisioned to be “a citizen-centric philosophy and strategy that believes the best results are usually driven by partnerships between citizens and government, at all levels”. I read this to mean yet more government, with the feds being the “senior partner”. Let me offer this: A little more of this and a little more of that in governing adds up to nothing but more government, not necessarily better government. So, how about giving less government a chance? “Give us a chance” is the whole idea around which grass-roots political action is rising. That rumble we hear in the background is building to a crescendo, and politicians are ignoring it at their peril.

Since the days of Woodrow Wilson, progressives have been searching for ways to change our government, which they believe will bring us to some utopian level of greater good and promote the general welfare. The truth is, we don’t need to change our current “Government 1.5” to a “2.0” version, we need a return to “Government 1.0”, the Constitution we started with. And that is my hope for the Tea Party, that somehow they will find a way to “reset” of our federal government to the Constitutional Republic it was meant to be!