Innocent Bystanders

What’s Wrong With America October 23, 2010

I’m not saying that all this stuff is bad. It’s just not the purpose of our federal government and we don’t need pinheads in D.C. making six-figure incomes to get it done.

I’m going to elaborate on the above remark that I made in a comment thread below.

The vice of the last 80 years in America (meaning, since FDR) is that we began to believe the federal government exists to do good, rather than just fulfill its constitutionally appointed duties.  Thus, we looked to Washington, D.C. to get us through the Great Depression, resulting in the New Deal that, by all accounts, prolonged the Great Depression.

We did not learn from that mistake, preoccupied as we were by WWII.

Since then, we have routinely elected politicians like Johnson, Nixon, Bush, and Obama, and a horde of their ilk in Congress, all of whom were do-gooders, and prided themselves on tackling problems like poverty, education, a TV channel as cool as the BBC, the lack of electricity in Appalachia, AIDS in Africa, you name it.

Oh yeah, I forgot to mention racism.  That’s the Real Big Issue™ for the do-gooders.

They tackled that issue and made it worse.  They destroyed black families, functional black neighborhoods, and inner-city school systems.  Then they patted themselves on the back for their “equal opportunity” crusade, giving themselves credit for advances by blacks which the labor market would have accomplished more quickly and effectively without them.  They all had Ivy League degrees and good intentions.

We’re stuck with a culture where white people recoil in horror at the obscenities of black rappers, our jails fill up with young black men, and we despise their culture of single-moms, dependency, and victimization pimps like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, both of whom expect us to accept their ludicrous claims to clergy status and political legitimacy rather than dismissing them as shake-down artists. Blacks are doomed to “the soft bigotry of low expectations,” a reality that propelled our current President to the White House on the basis of an amazingly thin resume, only to fail.

The problem is, the do-gooders in D.C. don’t actually have the ability to do any good unless they suck money from us into the federal government, and then send a portion of  it back with a bunch of regulations attached, and inevitably their programs designed by their smart Harvard grads don’t work.

Worse yet, unlike the states, they could accomplish this without any responsibility for balancing the books of the federal government, and without inciting a taxpayer revolt.

They could nationalize the Hubert Humphrey Do-Gooder Impulse™ for one, and only one, reason.

They controlled a fiat currency which happens to be the reserve currency for the rest of the planet. Everybody else was soaking up our debt.

That game is over.  The clock has run out for the do-gooder politicians.  China is thinking twice about increasing its exposure to U.S. Treasuries.  Everybody is looking sideways at the dollar.

That’s really what is behind the Tea Party. They are looking at the debt being imposed on their children, they are looking at the unreliability of the dollar, and they have a simple message for D.C.

STOP TRYING TO DO GOOD!