The Default Government

June 3, 2010
Mexico is a good example of a society in flux, yearning for freedom while still under the bondage of age-old societal governance of dominance and slavery. It almost seems like mankind, as a whole, just invites this kind society. We don’t know how to be free. If an extra-terrestrial or a god came down, ended all hunger, everybody treated exactly the same, get the same house, the same toys and hardly any work, would we be happy? No. There’s always something to be twisted and turned into an argument. You see in the movies the standard Utopia, where father and son talk about how good it is to share and how it’s their privilege to work for the benefit of all. They’re cheerful and hardworking and usually handsome. Trouble is it has existed—briefly. We’re most familiar with the communes of the sixties. The whole era purported to be one of peace and for most of the young people, that was genuine. Summer of Love, yeah. Turned into a nightmare of rioting and hate. Some of those people broke off and formed communes. They quickly found that human nature doesn’t function well under the share and share alike system. One person might hoard, another has to be prodded to do his fair share of work. After a while, fighting breaks out, division occurs.

The US is an anomaly. For the whole history of the world, it’s been a top down kind of government. First hunter-gatherers, allied themselves with a strong warrior type who demonstrated leadership traits. And so when the wildebeest came down, the warrior-king got first and most, his best friends got the next best, then the other hunters and finally women and children got what was left. This is humanity’s naturally occurring social structure. You can extrapolate from there, the king and the nobility, the dictator and his execution squad… none of it’s been fair. It is just humanity.

The founders were marvelous. Many consider them divinely inspired. Certainly they were geniuses. They understood all the clichés, power corrupts and all that. They understood that freedom was a difficult concept for man and there was a dangerous tendency to follow the crowd like a sheep. They set up the government with all of mankind’s flaws taken into account. And those flaws haven’t changed and never will until the millennium and they feared that even with all that, the country could still slide back into default mode. When I was in school, I was taught how smart they were, creating checks and balances, listing various freedoms guaranteed the people by virtue of just being human. This included the right to manage your own business, work hard and build something without interference by the government. That wouldn’t have happened in feudal societies. There, the minute something good is built up, in comes the king’s men, announcing that this business henceforth belongs to the king and heavy taxes are imposed. (Wait! Isn’t that what’s going on now?) Sometimes they’d just break it up and discourage anyone from being productive again. People can be so shortsighted. That’s why America was set up with the idea being to limit government. Giving power to a few is dicey at best. You might start out with a very intelligent and nice person in power, but what happens when Hitler,or Mao or Stalin gets the power? Murder in the Millions. Stalin starved millions of Russians by taking all their grain, selling it and buying up weapons. Look up Cyrus the Great of Persia. He took power in ways that would make the average American cringe, but respected the talents, arts and religion of each. At some point, cities would just come out and surrender to him. Many kings would have raped and pillaged just to set an example, but he didn’t. He brought together people of many talents to build, to learn from one another. That’s as close as the world came to a free trade society, where good things were valued. Unfortunately, his descendents weren’t as enlightened. I believe his son and maybe grandson continued this policy; one named Darius sent the Jews home with supplies to rebuild their temple. You can have it good for 20-30 years with power given to a few. But it doesn’t last

Once given, power is difficult to take back. In the meantime, we are growing the Gimme State, those who want the power given by socialism are making use of anything they can and they’re using mankind’s tendency to be lazy and grab for free things and stirring it up, promising a kind of utopia. Yeah, we might all be equal, equally mediocre and uninspired to work hard. When you depend on government for everything, there’s no reason to work.

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.