If you were going to repair a car and it was so cobbled up you decided the only way to make the vehicle into viable transportation was to just junk it and build a new one you would be faced with a whole new list of opportunities of what could be. The same thing is visible in the current state of politics. Everyone calls for reform but the only thing that continues unabated is government growth. There are more government employees which must be funded by taxes or debt, there are more government taxes and regulations that confound and contradict each other. The conflict with the Federal government and Arizona depicts this quite clearly. The tax code in indecipherable, the foreign policy is deplorable and the corruption and bribery is rampant. This I contend is a broken down junker that needs a complete replacement. How to go about it is the crux of this article.
First, knowing that we have come from some faulty beginnings this is the first thing to remedy. It has always been axiomatic that every government ever formed must be funded by taxation. Why? Those who favored taxation use the argument that people would not pay for the protection of their rights by voluntary contributions. To propose that the way to protect your rights is to violate them with forced payments is easily seen as not only a poor argument but after witnessing world history it has failed to do anything but create debt ridden governments who spend money they confiscate on unending political tripe. This spending leads to borrowing and increased taxation and eventual money printing that fuels inflation and decay. From the earliest attempts with this model all results have been identical. There have been lulls in the spending and prosperity has occasionally broken through but eventually all prosperity is subjected to confiscation and government spending. This sequence of events should tell us that if we start over with the same beginning point we will end up like all our predecessors. This is not progress but the repeating of a fundamental mistake in the hope that this time the result will be different. This is also a prescription for insanity.
Let’s suppose we challenged the notion that government would require forced payments for its activities. All other agencies and businesses must rely on persuasion and voluntary payments for their services. What is so unique about government that it receives a pass on this requirement? Nothing. It has been assumed and people who have formed governments all concluded (without questioning the wisdom or the consequences) that taxes are a given. The spenders of other people’s money couldn’t wait to do “great” things by confiscating and spending to convince voters they were acting in the voter’s interests. Since they couldn’t cover everybody some got favors and some didn’t. Some paid for others benefits and the government announced it was for justice for all. Very few objected and those who did were quieted by the crowds crying for the benefits they envisioned as “free. What if there was no “pot” of public funds to be passed out to gain votes? What if money for government activities had to come from persuasion on the validity and the integrity and the reputation of the vendor of protection? Think of the promises that would then be made and kept and the fiscal responsibility that would ensue. This is the way a business operates and the only reason government does not and cannot and will not operate this way is because it can legally rob people. Any other business with the ability to rob people would operate as the government does now. Why worry about the bottom line or the competition if all you have to do is say, “Stick em up?
Mankind can rethink its mistakes but until now it has never questioned how or why a government is formed and what basic requirements can stain it forever or make it a sustainable agency. The invention of a constitution was a step in this direction but it still left open the funding issue and continued to assume this would not be a major concern. As we saw it grew and grew until now we have more government than we can afford and nothing in sight to change the path we are on. When you come to the end of the road and you find it is not where you wanted to end up the entire path including the starting point must be up for consideration. This is where we find ourselves today. Following a path that leads to the same demise of all other governments who have started down and continued on a path that can only lead to one destination. We as humans can question and correct faulty methods, premises and actions. We use these skills in our private endeavors but we seem to forget they exist when it comes to examining out political structure. What keeps us from critically examining and correcting this oversight can be found in the method we defer to when addressing this phenomena. We look to faith which is a reliance on the actions of others. We hope they will not bankrupt us and we have faith they will act honorably. History has shown this has been a mammoth oversight and we have paid a tremendous price for this lack of judgement. It is not too late to point out the fallacy of allowing legalized robbery and realizing that if a government can raise billions to become elected it can raise billions ( voluntarily) to run the activities the voters approve of.
There can be no doubt that recovery of the economy is on a weak and shaky path. Profits are denounced ( although they are what is needed to fund jobs and growth), taxes are expected to rise and the currency is on the road to hyper-inflation. We can continue to hope and have faith or we can analyze what went wrong and correct it. A new beginning can only happen if we decide to start over and correct the errors built into the previous attempt to build a nation.
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