Obama's Utopia?

We all have ideas about the ideal society. It gives us a warm feeling to think of this wonderful culture where everyone works hard and bring all their harvest & goods to a central authority for sharing. If someone gets injured, sick or old & infirm, the common wealth is shared with them and one of the workers gladly and willingly takes care of them. There’s beautiful statuary in the town squares, with wonderful colorful murals on the walls and flowers surrounding soothing waterfalls. The rulers are these beautiful people, a handsome king with his beautiful wife and children, dressed in glittering gold and jeweled clothing walking around the peaceful capital, giving away presents to the adoring people that surround them respectfully. I don’t know why, but when this particular fantasy plays out in my mind, I give it Egyptian style. In this utopia, no one is poor and all work willingly, glad to do their fair share. I first dreamed this up when I was about nine.

As I got older, I realized why this could never work in real life. People are lazy! People are greedy! People are selfish and just plain mean at times. Not everybody, not any one person all the time, but enough to make my dream of utopia unworkable.

I came to this conclusion when I tried to structure a system of laws for my gleaming city. I would watch about crime on the news programs of tv. Fellow classmates teased me. My sisters would whine about doing chores and I watched a neighbor walk back and forth in front of our house going to buy cases of beer. The reality is, human nature won’t allow for a share and share alike system or society.

Not too long after that, I learned about communism & socialism, how it was supposed to be like my utopia, but somehow it just didn’t work out. Considering human nature, what a surprise. Sharing the wealth and giving a government control of how it’s to be distributed is like posting a notice: Greedy and power hungry people wanted for wealth redistribution. Good perks. Time and again through all of human history, it’s been shown that power corrupts and wealth breeds greed. Even when a ruler rises that turns out to be a good and conscientious man, his son usually turns out to be a pig, instituting repressive changes. Hence all the bread lines in Russia, people waiting 18 hours to buy a couple of rutabagas. Fields weren’t planted or if they were, weren’t harvested because always, somewhere along the line, someone didn’t do their job and everyone else figured, why bother to work if no one else does. East Germany was a miserable gray country until the wall was torn down and they rejoined their brothers in the west. The world was appalled. Damage from WWII hadn’t been repaired. Factories suffered from high absenteeism because everyone was paid the same whether they worked or not and turned out abysmal products. Manufacturing equipment was decades old, since there wasn’t enough money to upgrade.

Governments have never done anything efficiently. Time and again, experiments with privatization, primarily prisons, have shown that the private sector can weed out waste more efficiently than government. And yet our president and those who surround him think that putting the government in charge of everything is good. Currently, Obama is working on the deficit by striking out at the very people who make the jobs for the people who pay the taxes. If the people in charge of what drives our very economy are scared of what might come next, they are going to hold off on the business expansions that create new jobs and probably close down some of what they’re already doing. Regulating free enterprise makes a very un-free enterprise indeed.

Our founders set up our government to be small for a reason. They knew that men could not be trusted with extreme power. Overseas you see it when things are budgeted taking bribery and graft into account. In the US, missions over seas are budgeted the same. Over here, you see it in government programs like medicare where doctors bill for services not performed, or nonexistent patients. Undoubtedly, officials higher in the food chain find a way to extort some for themselves. It’s like prisoners in prison, as soon as you catch on to one trick, they devise another. It’s crazy. If those men put half the ingenuity and work into something legitimate, they’d be well off legally. In other areas where money isn’t as involved, graft still finds a way, as in the superintendent who makes up a new management job and puts his favorite nephew into the position

Not only is government expanded with a stroke of the pen signing in health care mandates, the IRS is put in charge of “enforcing” this law. Why isn’t that sending a shiver down the spine of Americans? How often have innocent Americans been tortured by this agency? It is a perfect example of power corrupting.. People who enjoy power seek out these kinds of job and some of these are people who enjoy making others suffer. I think there should be a psych test for applicants and periodic exams thereafter and perhaps yearly in-services on being fair and considerate.

Government is too prone to corruption. Mankind is too prone to corruption. Together, they make something altogether too horrific.