The high-stakes game of…

…individualism vs. government

A few days ago, I wrote about the zero-sum balance between government and liberty. There is yet more to the story. Not only does our liberty depend upon limiting government, our fiscal health also relies upon restraining government reach.

Just as our freedoms and rights are impacted whenever the people clamor for the government to “do something,” so too do our wallets suffer the consequences of sacrificing our individualism on the altar of government.

Government can do little, if anything, without money. Thus, anytime government intervenes, whether it be to provide a service or to build and maintain infrastructure, funds must be found. And from where does the government garner its greenbacks? From you and me…through taxes.

The more the government “does,” the more money it requires. The more individual responsibility we abdicate to government, the more it costs us, both in freedom and finance.

What’s worse is that government is incredibly inefficient at running any type of program. Such programs often involve multiple levels of bureaucracy which add to cost and complexity, reduce how much of the funds actually service the program itself, and inevitably leads to fraud.

Don’t believe it? Look at annual medicare fraud. Look at all the illegal aliens receiving government assistance to which they have no right or claim. Look at the medicare, food, welfare, and child care fraud recently uncovered in Minnesota. And the list goes on. Government-run programs are fraught with fraud, both from within and from without.

At the state level this is bad, billions of dollars worth of bad. At the federal level? It is far worse. In addition to corrupt bureaucratic processes, tax dollars have been used to fund NGOs whose main purpose is to undermine the American people. So we’re paying for our own destruction. And that to the tune of tens, if not hundreds, of billions of dollars.

If we read the thoughts of our forebears, we find that our government is not intended to be a service organization. As Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence, and he and 55 other founding fathers attested by signature, we are endowed by our Creator with particular rights, and “That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men...”

Notice, government is to secure our rights, not attend our needs. Those who fought for the independence of our country were also fighting for their individual independence - independence to forge their own way, to live their own lives. They fought for individualism and self-governance.

This does not mean they did not look after one another. What they did not do, however, was lay the onus of caring for their needs or their neighbors upon the government. Such can only lead (as we see in society today) to a form of tyranny. As I quoted from John Taylor of Caroline in my previous piece:

By our political theory, the people are supposed to be the patrons of the government, and not the government the patron of the people. A theoretical reversal of this principle, is a theoretical advance towards tyranny; and a practical reversal of it, either by an assumption of power by a government, to prescribe constitutional regulations to the people, or to use their property in donations to individuals or combinations, is in my view, both theoretical and actual tyranny.

Tyranny Unmasked, p. 145

This reversal of roles is a costly one, one that puts at stake our liberty and our wallets. While the founders believed the state governments should provide certain internal (each to its own State) infrastructure improvements, they never sought for the state to provide for individual “welfare.” Medicine has naught to do with the state. Income has naught to do with the state (other than it potentially being taxed). Other provisions and services were left to individuals and ingenuity.

There are also further corruptions and inefficiencies in the federal government taxing the people and then remanding monies back to the states. Such practice leads to an upending of the proper power hierarchy in the country (a topic for another time).

Private citizens and private (meaning, not state-owned or run) organizations are far more efficient and effective at providing goods, services, and yes, even charity, than government ever could be. And while individuals and corporations are certainly corruptible, the extent to which such corruption can cause damage comes nowhere near approaching the extent of damages which corruption of government services may cause.

What’s more, the greater spending power government is granted, the more it seeks. Once government gets a taste for expenditure, its appetite for such becomes insatiable. This is why the national debt continues to grow - it is not because the government does not collect enough taxes; it is because the government refuses to cut back on its spending. Government’s answer to every “problem,” and every failure, is spend more.

Thus, we enter a vicious cycle of spend, fail, spend more to deal with the failure, fail some more…. And on and on it goes. Giving government the responsibility that belongs to the individual is a losing proposition. It is, most assuredly, a high-stakes game that is not worth playing.