8/26/12

I used to get many of my best ideas while listening to the Sunday morning talk guy on the popular local radio station. He was what you might call a raving liberal, not simply because of his immoderate communistic ideas, but because he liked to deliver said ideas as ill-tempered rants. Ostensibly a few hours dedicated to talking religion, the show generally slid instead into the same issues and arguments I like to engage. But rather than promoting his own agenda and arguing against other ideas, this guy preferred instead the vicious attack aimed at insulting those evil folks who harbored the opposite view. He was a nasty fellow. And of course his argument was always delivered from his perception of the moral higher ground, as this was a religious talk show. 

A former priest whose apparent only claim to fame was his abandonment of his former church, he left the radio station abruptly when he had to go to jail. Something about that huge stash of kiddie porn on his computer. I guess his apple hadn’t fallen all that far from the tree. And with him went a major inspiration for my moral outrage.

Now on Sundays I listen some to the NPR talkers on the radio as they preach to the choir. They are at least polite while they talk down to those of us who are too slow to figure out their obvious truths. I’ll listen to arguments presented politely, particularly when they are clearly researched and delivered, which you certainly can get from the NPR folks. I don’t have to agree with them and I actually enjoy listening to how they’d solve the world’s problems, since we all are inevitably headed down that persistently failed path and I’d like to see where I’ll soon be unwillingly herded.

This morning I encountered an interesting lecture on the radio. A clearly intelligent and educated young woman was pointing out the obvious need for a food source for all those folks living in great cities, since they don’t produce any on their own, and yet they still need to eat. Somebody somewhere else must create food, preserve it, transport it, and often prepare it, or those city folks are quickly gonna come up short. And amazingly enough, this has been going on ever since personkind (see how nice I can be to these people?) first set up cities and farms many thousand years ago.

According to this woman, most folks haven’t noticed that all the great civilizations, each born from large cities, sent out their armies to capture empire, onna count of the food they could steal from those other folks to feed their own. Today’s talker mentioned Rome, and its empire. A logical choice since they were successful for some long while. She forgot to mention the Nazis and their motivation to invade east into Poland and Russia during a time early in WWII when they should instead have been invested to the west. Nobody seems to remember that the main motivation here was the grain producing land over there, and the peasants who could be enslaved to farm it for the benefit of the winner of this war, and its people living in large cities. Too bad the Nazis lost, for they would have been set for life.

This dilemma of farms over there and cities growing larger and hungrier over here continues. The point of this kind lady’s talk concerned her concept of the corruption of the free market by large corporations that are messing with her food supply and forcing everyone in big cities to eat fast food and other evil concoctions. She of course, favors living in a city, and she finds herself at the mercy of said free market. Apparently she lacks the will it takes to move out of a city, or fend for herself, or simply avoid MacDonalds. And she suggests that many have the same handicap. So she assumes that someone else must take the reins and correct this travesty.

Not surprisingly, she figured a solution, which would be government regulation and control to keep the crooked corporations from harming the helpless people.  Utopia can be created with the proper orchestration.  According to her, government could control all this, the production and distribution, and all that which sounds vaguely of communism, and make it work out to the benefit of her friends who live in those cities. Heard this one before of course. On NPR, along with other sources. So did those folks who let the Nazis rule. Didn’t work out all that well for them.

Not all government is a bad as the Nazis of course. Most are simply bloated, inefficient, ineffective dumps that eventually just make things worse for the governed. Our speaker was hoping for this thing she calls “Good Government”. You know… a fairy tale government that actually works to the benefit of the people, rather than simply a self-perpetuating black hole that sucks the life out of a society. With the election coming up we will be hearing lots of lies from people who wish to rule us by promising “Good Government” yet again, which will fix all our problems. 

Funny how one side can watch its favored candidate make millions every year, yet they find fault with the other side’s guy because he makes millions every year. I saw one of their political ads the other night, attacking that other rich guy. That rich guy, or so the hatchet job states, paid only 14% of his twenty million income in taxes last year. Suppose this is accurate, which in a rare deviation from the usual hatchet job might actually be true, then this guy paid some 2.8 million dollars in taxes. That’s some considerable more than I did. You too, likely. This ad is aimed at folks who pay NOTHING in federal tax, to make the guy look bad.  He is taking advantage of the system cause he only pays 2.8 million. 

I love this kind of thinking. He should be forced to pay even more, so more folks could benefit from government largess rather than their own efforts, or lack thereof. Somebody is suggesting that the government needs a greater sacrifice from the successful so it can do its job, whatever that is. This is logic? Or is it emblematic of the greed manifested by every government, in the guise of helping us?

The coming election won’t be the last word on whether we turn everything over to yet another overreaching government. It is far from that. But the notion that we really should turn everything over to government eventually is the clear goal of one side, and only a significant goal to the other. There will be no winners among the us out here. It’s only a question of how quickly we choose to lose.

I’ll be eating from our garden, and chewing on the grass fed buffalo I killed, and I’ll dine at MacDonalds or not, based on my choice. My dollars and choices, along with many others can help change the corruption of the free market, for it will go where the demand, demands. Haven’t found a way yet to fix the damage done by “Good Government” except by limiting it, or eventually turning it out. As usual, shortly I’ll have to vote for the lessor of evils, but that is all the choice “Good Government” ever leaves you.