A Mind-Changing Page (The Destructive Power of Government)

The resilience of the American experiment is due to the fact that millions of people are allowed to make millions of decisions about their individual circumstances.  This creates a virtuous cycle in which problems are solved and the ship of state and the country fix problems as they arise.

Enter Leviathan, the Federal Government with its SOLUTION that crushes those individual actions or makes them impossible, and gradually the country founders.  Bring in the Feds and everybody walks away saying "you guys will take care of it."

Thomas Sowell has told us about this numerous times, and does it again with this fascinating statistic:

While the market produced a peak unemployment rate of 9 percent-- briefly-- after the stock market crash of 1929, unemployment shot up after massive federal interventions in the economy. It rose above 20 percent in 1932 and stayed above 20 percent for 23 consecutive months, beginning in the Hoover administration and continuing during the Roosevelt administration.

As Casey Stengel used to say, "You could look it up." It is all there on that one page.

Those who are convinced that the government has to "do something" when the economy has a problem almost never bother to find out what actually happens when the government intervenes.

When government intervenes in a big way, individual initiatives are stifled and dry up.  The Gulf oil spill is the most recent example.  The Jones act prevents foreign ships from effective participation in the clean up effort.  Government regulations prevent the building of barriers to the oil coming ashore.  Everywhere people on the Gulf are waiting for the government to tell them what to do and what they may do.  Thanks to the complex environmental laws, often people are prevented from taking, or afraid to take, effective action.  Government intervention and omnipresence leads the average person to become passive, apathetic and distrustful.  Government does nothing efficiently and its presence decreases the efficiency of individual actions.  Government gave us the Great Depression.  It's also giving us the Great Oil Spill by encouraging oil companies to drill offshore in very deep water where technology is stretched to the limit and accidents turn from problems to catastrophes. 

Thank you Big Government!