OBAMA’S WORLD: one nation under a secular paternal entity by Jean Snow VanOrden
In the late 90’s we lived for two years in the small village of Dryden N.Y. Upstate New York was a great new school for our western sensibilities. Unlike our ignorant vision of New York as a densely populated city of skyscrapers and concrete canyons, upstate is a green velvet panorama of picturesque villages, orchards, old Victorian architecture, mill streams, and even wild life. Our favorite season was autumn when the hills were ablaze with color and roadside stands overflowed with apples, squash, cider and pumpkins. We bathed in pools beneath raucous waterfalls and hiked mossy shale gorges.
We also experienced a style of government and politics we were unused to. The layers of taxation were mind boggling: village, town, county, state racked up tax bills that were Halloween scary. The property tax on our modest home was three times what we paid in Utah on a comparable home. We watched in dismay as several nearby plants that employed large numbers of the local populace closed to move where the tax burden would be lower. Economic growth had been stagnant for years. Home prices had plummeted drastically for several years before we arrived. Rural upstaters are more conservative than the city dwellers. As residents faced the likelihood of new state taxes they grumbled their perennial resentment that the bulk of the funds would end up being siphoned off to the liberal spending appetite downstate: New York City. Peggy Noonan’s column this week in the Wall Street Journal echoes what we experienced.
“This week the New York Post carried a report that 1.5 million people had left high-tax New York state between 2000 and 2008, more than a million of them from even higher-tax New York City. They took their tax dollars with them—in 2006 alone more than $4 billion. You know what New York, both state and city, will do to make up for the lost money. They’ll raise taxes.”
This gives you a clue as to why cutting taxes and negotiating tax incentives can actually raise tax revenue.
In January, after the coronation of the Democratic Party behemoth led by the golden child from Chicago, I declared myself a political agnostic. My fellow citizens made a hard left turn and I would just have to live with it. I decided to watch, wait, and rethink everything I believed about politics, the constitution, the economy, etc. Perhaps my political point of view had grown rigid and outmoded. Maybe I had it all wrong. Maybe the rallying cry of Ronald Reagan “Government is not the solution, government is the problem” was a naive sentiment that I would be better off shedding.
After ten months what I have observed has not impressed me. A large portion of our government doesn’t really care what we think of their plans for us. The majority in Congress is telling us by their rush to enact huge new social spending that they know what’s best for us and we will just have to give up a large chunk of our freedom, our income, and our children’s and grandchildren’s income, to let them establish their version of a righteous kingdom. Witness their scramble to back down on the “public option” when met with the ire of their constituents in town hall meetings only to slip it back on the agenda once re-entrenched in the halls of Washington.
Clearly there is no vision except the vision of making Americans more and more dependent on the government for their well-being.
In the Newsweek magazine with the head line “The Case for Killing Grandma,” there was an article about government health care programs around the world: “No Country for Sick Men.” Canadians and Europeans expressed confusion as to why Americans, who believe all are created equal, don’t care enough to assure equal health care. But what the author entirely overlooked is that Americans care a great deal about each other BECAUSE our country is rooted in the ultimate caring for each individual: giving them the liberty to make something of themselves in an environment that encourages personal responsibility and productivity. Our nation also has an equally strong Jeffersonian heritage of deep suspicion of government excess. And rightly so. We are a stubbornly independent people.
Government programs are a mythical panacea for whatever ails us physically and economically. Government kills the spirit by creating a labyrinth of gray, faceless bureaucracies that live to perpetuate themselves and punish creativity, enterprise, productivity, ambition, and prosperity. Have you ever gone into a government office and felt to say “Oh joy, isn’t this a wonderful place to be! I love standing in these lines and filling out these forms.” Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are hollow promises when human beings no longer work for themselves but live to serve the great collective through a maddening concatenation of government regulations.
Be assured that what we are witnessing in America today is not an efficient, money saving, labor saving road to an idyllic progressive state. Efficiency and fairness are not the guiding force. Political favoritism, corruption, abuse of power, and ego are riding on the coattails of misguided altruism used as a means to increase the power of the few: a secular paternal entity with a voracious appetite for our hard earned money.
Our current economic meltdown did not happen because of unregulated greed but because of Government sponsored and enabled greed. We don’t need more regulations. We need simpler ones that are enforced. Our system of regulation is so mind boggling that the expense of even understanding, let alone enforcing millions of regulations is unsustainable. Witness the rampant corruption and waste in Medicare recently highlighted on 60 Minutes. Ineffective administration and enforcement, whines the bureaucrat, is because “we don’t have enough funding to police the system.” So we create more rules that we cannot afford to enforce. Politicians create entitlements and bureaucracies that citizens become comfortable with and grow to depend on. Then politicians wield greater and greater control over the populace through the entitlements they create. Entitlements become corrupt, wasteful, unimaginative arms of government that exist largely to perpetuate themselves not the good of citizens. At some point government handouts and intervention become a prison where the only freedom is the freedom to quit being productive.
I believe in giving people a helping hand. I believe in helping people to help themselves. Then they can exercise virtue by giving freely rather than being forced to by the paternal hand of a government sanctioned pick-pocket.
UPDATE: Related story