Why are we giving them MORE power?

NO ONE likes the gov’t. ALL gov’t has an inefficiency built in. Waste, minor graft, impersonal beuracratic abuses exist even in the most duty bound and benign department. And the US Gov’t is basicly that. We don’t have it in our cultural DNA to be TOO abusive from on high. Oh sure there are some pretty nasty things lain at the feet of our gov’t, but relatively speaking it’s not as nasty as their contemporaries. Militant Germans, Revolutionary Russians, Nationalist Chinese, Jacobin French… the list goes on... ALL have worse evils on their score card than any the US Body Politic has perpetrated and racked up at its worst. Small consolation for the ones ground up under the local boot heel, yes.

Plus there is the whole problem of the gov’t DOING something on a subject that they don’t really know much about. Kim DuToit started in, from inspiration by Doctor Thomas Sowell, on this:

Until Wilson, or maybe even Lincoln we had built in safeguards. Disperse power and keep it small to avoid any one parts graft and corruption from doing too much harm when that graft and corruption manifests itself.

Ok, I’m going to say Lincoln’s stretches of power did more good than harm. So we’ll stop with him. If we get to a Lincoln level of gov’t, then, THEN we can argue if it is too oppressive. But Wilson was a monster. His War Socialism was a Great Leap Forward in the ‘telling you common folk what to do for your own good’ and ‘the ends justifying the means’. His was the start. He made it possible for FDR’s over-reach and explosion of gov’t, and LBJ’s after him then History’s Greatest Monster, James Earl Carter. So bad was this power expansion that we think Reagan’s minor gains in the other direction were reactionary.

Left not forget Teddy Roosevelt. His certainty and self-rightiousness, while not overly burdensome, was the germ of an idea that led to the monster Wilson. But at least Teddy realized his folly and opposed Wilson, recognizing that public officials aren’t necessarily the peoples servant, as he tried to be, but can strive to be the ‘People’s Master’ and a Horror which no one contemplated. Plus he thought Wilson a namby pamb. Teddy couldn't abide one of those milk sops, and worked his entire life throwing of the soppitude he was born into himself.

Oh sure, we’re Americans. We try to be nice about it, when we tell you how to live your life. We try to have noble intentions. It just doesn’t work out that way. A goodly portion of the American public does NOT want to be domestic animals, and chafe at the gov’t yoke. Another portion just wants stick their nose into your bidness and tell you what to do. It's been like that since the 1600s, with Frontiersman (in the wilds of NEW ENGLAND of all places) and the Puritans butting heads.

The solution? Well a smaller gov’t works to that. Paying attention to our inherent checks and balances. In most things gov’t can be small and a petty tyrant impacts fewer people when strangled off from large parts of the Treasury and confines him to petty matters. And where the gov’t HAS to be big, you have to rely on the checks and balances to keep the power in check and causing the least harm. That and our tradition of niceness. For example, our Cincinnatus tradition that was started by George Washington himself. Where he served as Commander and could have seized power, but instead returned to Mt. Vernon to resume his life of Gentleman Planter. The tradition continued in the themes that Eisenhower warned us about; a military industrial complex over stretching it’s boundries. He wasn't anti-military by any means, but he new a check was needed, written or not. Even now our professional military is very comfortable with heeding the call and then returning to the ‘farm’ when the duty is done.

Don’t trust crusaders that sound the alarm about some new problem and have a solution all ready to solve it when that solution entails, “first, YOU give ME a bunch of power over you…” The problem could be oppressed workers ‘suffering’ under capitalism, too much bug spray in the air killing robins, a coming ice age from our pollutants blocking out the sun, or a coming heatwave from our pollutants holding in the heat. Don’t trust them ESPECIALLY if they appeal to a desire to protect the little children.

Don’t trust them when their solution is a TWO whole brand new gov’t entities that make ordinary people queue up into lines, take off their clothes and remove their fingernail files, all to prevent a recurrence of an event that now would never come off. 6 men are not going to ever gain control of an airplane with knives. The passengers won’t stand for it. Their actions have ended hijacking forever because people's internal policy of "be calm and sit quiet, do what they say, and we can all get out of this alive" has been fundamentally wrong.

And we don’t need the federal gov’t enforcing the laws on crimes that the local beat cop used to do. But if you shrink the gov’t and you will choke off superfluous law enforcement agencies. And other things. Let us complainers complain about bigger themes and let the power chasers chase power as long as that power is small.