Resolving the Government Stalemate

President Obama said on July 23rd, in a nationally televised town meeting, that the primary problem was that people were only listening to one side of the debate on solving the national debt problem and capping the debt. He said that if they only got their news from one source like Fox News, that they just don’t understand the problem and that it was causing entrenched positions. Essentially, he was blaming the news for the problem of a stalemate between him and Congress. Obviously, if people only listen to one source, they may have a biased view, but that is not the cause of the problem in Washington and his relationship with Republicans in Congress. The problem is much more basic than resolving differences in whether to increase taxes or not. The problem is that there are fundamental differences in belief between him and Conservatives about the role of the Federal Government. He believes the solution is government. Conservatives believe the problem is Government. Those beliefs are so radically opposed as to make it impossible to agree on much of anything.

It always strikes me as strange that any well educated person in the subjects of history, government, economics, finance, business, or political philosophy can in the year 2011 believe that governments can manage any nation’s economy, can deliver services more efficiently than the private sector, or can provide for the wants and needs of all of its people at a higher level than a capitalist system. I would just love to debate this publically with anyone that believes that government is better. You cannot find any examples, anywhere when that was true. The answers are so obvious that they cause me to wonder what our education system teaches these days. It isn’t about differences in philosophy. Those have been debated for hundreds, even thousands of years. Most of the issues debated today were addressed by Cicero more than 2000 years ago. Most of the major philosophies have been tried numerous times and Capitalism has always been the winner. Sovereign Republics as a form of government have been the most efficient and they are for some very simple reasons.

Don’t let people try to tell you that socialism and communism are different things. They are both part of Marxist Communism as defined by Karl Marx. Socialism is the governmental system for achieving a communistic economic state. It has been tried over and over and all end the same way in totalitarian states whose economies collapse from their own weight, resulting in social revolution. It is an evitable evolution toward collapse because no one has yet found a way to prevent it. Socialism, like the kings or emperors of prior times, requires complete control of all social activity. In order to do this, it requires an enormous bureaucracy to manage it. The growth of the bureaucracy is uncontrollable for reasons too numerous to discuss here, but because of the size, it requires larger and larger segments of the revenue of the nation to support it. Since governments produce nothing on their own, this revenue does not produce growth, but slowly strangles the output capacity of the non-government segment until there is simply not enough money to support it. Does that sound at all familiar?

The Soviet Union, Cuba, Venezuela, most of South America, and Eastern Europe, all experienced economic failures under these systems, yet they keep repeating the same mistake. Isn’t it insanity to make the same mistake over and over while expecting a different outcome? Why would sane people want to turn over their liberty and decisions to government bureaucrats whom we all know do little, complicate our lives, and generally make a mess of everything they are involved in? The problem here is not where we get our news. The problem is that politicians and the public have a fundamental difference about whether we want more government or less. It is whether we want government to take more control of our lives or less. It is whether we believe in our founding fathers belief in a free people or one in which government makes the decisions. It is whether we believe in free markets or government controlled markets who decide what and how much to produce. It is Socialism versus Republicanism. We won’t change those differences in view. We can only change the politicians and elect those who believe what we believe.