The Sun Also Sets
Amen. But I thought to myself: Nothing that government does makes me want the government to play a bigger role in anything.
At one point, I would have questioned this: But what about roads and bridges and airports and the military, etc? But those days are gone now. What with high-speed rail to nowhere, and a swampy and completely politicized military? Today, government has lost the ability to even address basic and practical needs.
Ronald Reagan said that: Government is not the solution to the problem; government is the problem. Good sound bite. But then he made a deal with Tip O'Neill to drastically lower tax rates. Great, but what did O'Neill get in return? Well, the two of them proceeded to grow government by some seventy percent while Reagan was in office. Seventy percent.
Personally, I think O'Neill got the better end of the deal. Any fool can look at the Laffer Curve and see what happens to government revenue when you lower the tax rate. Politically he could never admit it, but O'Neill was no fool. And so he made the deal with Reagan knowing that government revenue was about to explode.
Even if you want to make the argument that O'Neill was too lefty to appreciate or even acknowledge the Laffer Curve, he and his constituencies were definitely the beneficiaries of it.
And so, even during the "most conservative" administration of our lifetime, we got vastly more government. But what did we taxpayers, er...citizens get?
So again, let's ask: Is there anything that government does that we want more of?
And evidently, for more than half of us, the answer is yes.
Let's start with the biggest part of this constituency: Government employees. If you work for government, you want more government. It is job security and a bigger fiefdom for you. The same it true for health care workers and teachers and academics. What's that you say? Your university (or hospital or school) is private? Well, where is the money coming from?
Another large yes constituency is big business. At one time a fairly conservative lot, today big business is in bed with big government. Hey, a large government with lots of regulations keeps the upstarts at bay and the profits flowing. The reason big business is in bed with big government is because big government is good for big business. So today, we have both the union hall and the boardroom voting for more government.
We can slice the American voting public in any number of different ways: The black vote, the Jewish vote, feminists, Hollywood, lawyers, etc. But most of these segments also want more government.
In fact, aside from the ever-shrinking Christian fundamentalist vote, I can only think of one group of people who do not want more government. And no, it is not white males, many of whom are in the above groups anyway. No, the one group that I can see that wants less government is small business and entrepreneurs. Please note how this group crosses all racial and orientation lines – All of them.
And here I don't mean well-funded Silicon Valley types who left research fellowships at Stanford to start yet another California Goggle-wannabe. All those people want more government.
No, I mean bootstrap entrepreneurs, in Atlanta and Cleveland. And I mean small and family businesses across the country.
I could write a whole post on them. But here's the point of this post: There are just not enough of them. We've lost. And because we've lost, the yes to more government crowd has won.
And so that is what we will get. More government. Note this applies to whichever party is in power. If Reagan did not stop it, did you really think that the Bushes would? Or Trump? The next Republican administration? Don't count on it.
And more government means more incompetence and more incoherence and the end results of these vacuous attributes. Incompetence reigns supreme. Reynolds is absolutely correct. Just look at the complete incompetence our wannabe tyrants have brought to the pandemic response. Expect more of this.
In The Sun Also Rises, there is a famous line, Hemingway's response to the question: How did you go bankrupt? Hemingway's answer: Gradually, then suddenly.
Perfect answer. But surely this applies to countries as well – Just think about how the Soviet empire declined slowly for decades and then fell quickly. So here is my question for you: Where are we in this long, sad process? Personally, I think we are at the very end of gradually.
Suddenly starts any day now.