The world is looking like a progressively scary place, and it’s not from the usual bad guy good guy conflict. Its what passes for a government nowadays. Governance as defined by the dictionaries suggests a governmental body is to establish policies, monitor their implementation, and assume accountability,in order to provide for the prosperity and enhancement of the governed. Increasingly, real governance is the last thing these governments have in mind. The swelling size, scope, and grasp for power is their calling, and the people who have to put up with them are increasingly angry, and increasingly desperate. Media takes passively takes pictures and reports the presence of the increasing chaos and occasional violence, but is blind to accept the cause as a failure of the governing class for what it would mean for the perceived notion of an ideal society. The longer the disconnect remains in perception, the larger the risk of a real calamity developing.
The bloated government: World history has not seen an economy the size of the United States of America. For a country with an annual greater than 17 trillion dollar marketplace of prosperity, the government has progressively grown to install its brand of ‘fairness’ on the interactions through regulations. The original design of a limited government with checks and balances has been thrown out with an exploding executive branch, that thinks every decision an individual makes should be weighted on equality of outcome, and a legislative branch that has abandoned its role in assuring budgetary restraint and oversight guidance. The anger of the population is palpable this election season. A healthcare program built on monstrous legislation and ever more monstrous regulation fails on every conceivable level, but no one will do anything because it is a centerpiece of a president’s legacy. The nation’s debt balloons out of all conceivable proportion, having doubled in just 8 years weighed against the previous 230 with over 100 trillion in unfunded mandates, more worth than exists in the world, and nobody will do anything because they risk their re-election. Laws are that define governmental integrity, paying of taxes, respect for individual privacy, and care with the nation’s secrets are blatantly ignored by the governing class, and no clean up of the corrupting and corroding influence is undertaken, as the governing class protect their own. Bloated beyond all credible size, the government exists to exist, to redistribute, and to grow some more.
The Utopian government: Governments more firmly are designed to construct societies as utopians wish they would be, rather than how societies best function. The current free-fall in Venezuela is the Primus Inter Pares. Despite the explosion of national wealth and massive industry expansion brought by the discovery of Venezuela’s enormous oil reserves, the inequities created between the poor and the flourishing middle class and nouveau riche led to the election of a uber-socialist government of Hugo Chavez, patterned after the equally utopian autocracy of Cuba. The nationalizing of the oil industry allowed the government coffers to fill directly, providing patronage money for electoral success through 2 cent a gallon gasoline, and essentially free goods, transportation, and housing for the poor. The inevitable collapse of infrastructure in the oil industry, collapse of oil prices, and explosion of the black market has led to only more delusional moves by the Chavez successor Maduro, and the doubling down of every economic malfeasance. The printing of money with rampant inflation destroying currency value has led to the monetary black market, price controls destroying any available goods, and increasing enforcement of these unworkable decisions by government backed thugs, a pattern seen over and over in countries like Zimbabwe and North Korea, but it has not distracted the Venezuelan autocrats one bit. Suffering is the daily bread of utopian paradise.
The Nanny State Government: When the European Union implemented fully the Schengen Area in 1999, it was to tell the 400 million Europeans under the union they knew the world better than any of their inhabitants. Designed to eliminate borders by eliminating passports, it put all trade and immigration under the province of a supra-national government in Brussels who wants to eliminate 2600 years of cultural diversity and create a european superstate. The single currency followed close behind with the adoption of the Euro, and the vision of vast continent of a like minded social compact gave the governors in Brussels ecstatic chills. Give Greece the Euro, and a Greek will become efficient and frugal, undifferentiated from the Germanic. Open the borders, and the immigrants will flow and provide low cost labor for the overseers, liberalize themselves, and become the Europeans of the tomorrow, joyous in the vision of a protected life, and immune to genetic callings of their tribe. The whole Potemkin Village is crashing down with the onslaught of a million undocumented immigrants from the Middle East and Africa with little to separate them but their desire to be brought under the nanny state economic safety net, and their complete distain for any contact with the European social libertine streak. The various governments have determined to ignore the severe cultural clashes that express themselves violently in assault, rape, and even murder and pretend this has nothing to do with the greater assimilation. The inevitable result is the rise of hard right movement predicated upon protecting their homes, family, and culture, but using the tools that echo the vigilante actions of times past with their inherent dangers.
The Adversarial Government: Governments reacting to any political activity to limit growing efforts to limit their scope or power are increasingly hostile and frankly dangerous. Individuals who looked to develop opposing political views in the United States to the prevailing government found their phones tapped, the tax returns audited, and their businesses hounded by governmental agencies. In Russia the would be czar has used a more effective tool of at least indirectly supporting the murder of political opponents through means as diverse and criminal as street assassination and radioactive poison. In China, the preferred means, is societal erasure, with massive prison sentences. In the nascent state of ISIL, the medieval means of drowned, burning alive and beheading are used with the joy of totalitarian zeal. These governments are no longer responsive to public pressures for they have assured themselves that they are too big to fail, too powerful to resist. In the world where government is your boss and not your servant ,the temptation to use available levers of power and hide behind the bureaucracy is great. On such assumption, revolutions are borne.
The Demagogue Government: The governments are progressively fronted by Demagogue Leaders. Appealing to the raw emotions of inequity and promoting the assurance of equality of outcome, the politics of leaders is to demand the increasing accumulation of powers in the hands of a single individual who will protect the people against the weakness of deliberative processes or the blind justice based on laws not emotions. From Obama to Trump, the promise is you can have what you want, you need only a leader who is willing to take any means necessary to achieve the end result. The checks and balances placed to prevent just such demagoguery is to be subverted and overwhelmed. In a society where the hard work of democracy seems passe’ and the idea of principles of governance antiquated to the speed of our current discourse, a strong handed leader seems the easy out.
We are entering into dangerous times with our eyes half closed. As a member of the diminishing group of people willing to discourse and legislate to a proper end, we need to be forceful in our defense of the constitutional concept. Listen before you speak. Read a book, and then another opposed. Think about our past, and reason about our future. Demand competence. Demand oversight of your government. Protect freedom of expression above all. Respect your traditions, and teach their value. Secure your future opportunity and guard it against all poseurs who would usurp it. And …make sure those who govern, that they do so only with the expressed assent of the governed and that they are under the same laws that govern all free society – none different, none selective. Hopefully, real push back, and the self correcting forces of an alert and engaged society will protect the world against the dark intent of predators and scoundrels.
Message: Go vote your principles, and if necessary, throw the bums out. Tomorrow is February 1st, and the future world we will live in is in our electoral hands, starting in Iowa. The world is watching carefully to see if there’s still a chance, that in the land that once was the beacon for hope for those under the yoke, good will still prevail.
