My Channel

Thursday, October 24, 2013

Small Government versus Less Government

DrewM at Ace of Spades hits it out of the park again and illustrates the fundamental divide between the GOP and Tea Party.
The Republican wing of the GOP (Speaker John Boehner, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, Senator Susan Collins, and Senator Bob Corker, etc) is interested not in “small government” but “smaller government”. “Smaller” than what? The answer to that is the key. Most often it’s not “smaller than we have now” it’s “smaller than the Democrats want it to be in the future but bigger than now”.
Indeed and the is the crux of the matter. Now he takes it through the differences between the establishment GOP and the Tea Party but I'd like to take it further to the democrats and leftists.

What is a conservative? What is the fundamental difference between a conservative an a liberal? If you do not believe that government is duty bound nor capable of providing for the people, then you are a conservative. The lesson is Obamacare. I don't need to link to the myriad of stories of how badly this thing is going. When you lose Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, ya got problems. But this is not an outlier, this is typical. Government is simply not an organization that can handle things like this because of the way it is set up. Congressmen, Senators, and Presidents all are political positions and their self-interests are all about getting votes. Promising freebies is the easiest and most cowardly way to get those votes.

A conservatives does not want freebies. He wants to take care of himself and have enough left over to enjoy life and help where he can. In essence, most everyone wants to redistribute wealth. A rich person giving to charity is indeed redistributing his wealth to the less fortunate. When he buys things, even yachts, he is helping those who work in that industry and a ton of other industries. (Remember my ketchup example.) No one sits and hoards his money and does nothing with it. The money would be worthless to them if they did. They purchase, they give.

A liberal wants someone else to decide where that money goes. He wants to take away that choice from you. If you are getting 30-50% of your salary taken by taxes, where does it go? Do you have a say on how it gets spent? And do you really, truly think that it is being spent competently? May I remind you of our brand new 290 million dollar website that can't even create a flat file correctly?

I believe most liberals (rank and file, not the far left) and conservatives want the same thing. But liberals will take away freedom to get it. And history shows that by putting the government in charge, you get much further away from the overall goal: prosperity for everyone.

Which brings me back to Drew's point. That the tea party understands this. The GOP does not. In fact I would not classify anyone who believes that "not as much government as what they want" is still in fact a liberal. The GOP is not conservative, only a few elected members can actually boast that label. The rest are liberal. Creating a program that takes away choice and spends only 100 billion is just as liberal as creating one that spends 900 billion. Now we are just haggling on price.

Until we as a people realize that we really don't need the government, we will continue to have these problems. As more and more people are dependent on the government for their very survival, it will be ugly and tough to get them off. For their betterment as human beings, we have to continue to fight.

There were no slaves in all my research that I can find who didn't want to be free. But we have a slave state again today. These slaves willingly stay that way. They are not required to work but in fact required NOT to. Their only requirement is to vote their masters into power. For this, they will be given public housing, food stamps, and an education that will tell them how much they owe to the government and how little hope they have because the rest of society will always be against them. Only the government can take care of you. No go out there and vote.

Their neighborhoods are awful. Their families are non-existent. They know that their lives are not right but they do not know why. They have no concept of freedom because they also have no concept of responsibility. We have effectively placed the shackles of fear and ignorance on them. It is not limited to inner city; indian reservations and poor rural communities all have the same problems.

The GOP is trying to keep these same ideas and programs in place that are the problem, not just simply how much money we spend, though that is a huge problem. These programs are sapping the souls of us as a people. Until they realize that, they are no better than the democrats.

No comments:

Post a Comment