by Roberto Diego

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This article was written a few weeks before the attack upon our nation that took place on September 11, 2001. It is as sad irony that it took an event of this magnitude to convince our politicians, if only long enough to make a few highly publicized comments for the media, that the most important function of government is the defense or our nation. To a great extent, the solidarity and bi-partisan cooperation we were seeing in Washington DC was due to the realization by the politicians that they have spent most of their attention ignoring the important work they should have been doing. Now that they have seen the damage, they are clamoring to partly dismantle the web of controls that have stifled our economic situation and kept the American people from being truly prosperous. In effect, they have realized that if they want to return to the day when they could divide up the budgetary pie and extort vast amounts of money for their home districts and states, they must first make the victim (the American taxpayer) prosperous. It is not surprising that while they are smiling and talking to us on our television screens about their cooperation (or lack of it) they are taking advantage of the situation to ensure that millions and even billions of dollars are spent on the wasteful agencies they have not fixed and on massive, wasteful and unnecessary spending programs. With this said, I will leave the original article as it is and merely ask the reader to consider: Had we not been required to waste our time thinking about such issues as campaign finance and government interference in the economy—issues created by politicians and their activities—might we have been able to provide the necessary defense or our nation?

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September 10, 2001. Dateline United States of America. The spectacle of politicians being politicians has become so boring that most Americans ignore it. The Democrats in Washington DC are attempting to deflect attention from possibly illegal activities that were engaged in by the Clinton Administration while in power by advancing campaign finance legislation. Neither side is actually concerned about illegality, morality, sleaziness and/or campaign finance reform. I submit that the problem is real but the solution is impossible unless insisted upon by the American public. I also submit that insistence will not come because the American public does not understand and has been kept from understanding the gross corruption that is at the heart of the problem.

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In spite of the fact that the American electorate has rejected the idea of welfare statism several times, welfare statists are undeterred from implementing their ideas through government spending programs that are intended to accomplish the same goals as welfare statism. Their tactic is to give us welfare statism piecemeal, one program at a time, until we finally arrive in their ideal state, regulated, controlled, disarmed and socially engineered by benevolent government. Apparently, they believe we are too involved in our day to day lives to notice that the direction we are taking is socialism—that they control the schools also helps them gain adherents at a young age. These liberals know that if they couch these programs under the banner of socialism, they will be rejected. So they attempt to “sell” them using market-based and moralistic arguments. The power of welfare statists has grown because they demagogically attach an aura of “moral” authority to the idea that government should be the provider of basic services rather than the protector of rights. They have decades of welfare statist experiences in Europe to show that “if Europe is advanced enough for it, why aren’t we?”

Surprisingly, creeping interventionism on behalf of powerful businessmen is part of the same basic strategy: to use the coercive powers of government to control and manipulate the productive powers and the lives of the quasi-free American consumer for their and their friends’ benefit—the public be damned. It is no coincidence that conservative politicians come out of the business world where government subsidies and contracts are a boon and that liberals come out of the universities where government power is the solution to all problems—and where a host of closet neo-neo-neo-Marxists (now called mainstream liberals) ensure that any idea that challenges their agenda is labeled politically incorrect and self-righteously censored. After all, there are noblemen and there are peasants. Lost in the confusion, the spin, the Big Lie and the moral hysteria of the welfare statists is the truth that interventionism creates gross economic distortions, huge wasted expenditures and massive theft of taxpayer money, not to mention economic depression. The day of reckoning will come when those who see the government as the solution to all problems will overburden the economic fabric and create a collapse. As in the past, when that day comes, they will have plenty of capitalists around to blame for the mess—those businessmen who did not pay for their political campaigns. The gross waste of unaccountable dollars and unaccountable politicians and bureaucrats that were the actual cause of the collapse will escape ridicule and be conveniently forgotten in a frenzy of false accusations against the “selfish” American businessman who “created” this mess because he was too free to do what he wanted to do. Turn the page…enter the American Hitler.

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It is certainly true that all money is spent by someone, either the government or a private citizen and that in the long run it winds up in some businessman’s bank account to be spent again. They key is the drain that inefficiency places on the economy and the inefficiency it creates on a macro level. Money spent by government on “bad ideas” is money that could have been spent by the citizens who created it on “good ideas” and the difference is told in the quality of the lives of those citizens. To a great extent, regulators and welfare statists both follow the Keynesian dictum that “in the long run we are all dead” and pursue their goals of income redistribution and economic control in an almost trance-like ritual dance where the thought that must be repeated over and over is: “it is the right thing to do, it is the right thing to do” completely oblivious to the truth that it is the individual rights of individual citizens whose lives they are affecting, and that the combination of regulation and bloated inefficient, corrupt government has virtually created the downtrodden citizens who are unable to provide for themselves—because massive educational programs provided no education, medical programs provided no effective health improvement, housing programs provided rats and filth, Social Security provided no wealth, the Interstate Commerce Commission provided no commerce and the Federal Aviation Administration destroyed air transport. Every dollar taken from one citizen is a dollar that could have been spent according to the values and goals of the person from whom it was taken. But of course, there are noblemen and there are peasants and the noblemen here are the government bureaucrats, politicians and their (now wealthy) friends who want to muscle in and take over. I’ll let you guess who is the peasant here.

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Looked at from another perspective, we must understand the dilemma of the honest politician today (if there can be such a thing in this environment). How can an honest politician win election in an atmosphere where the prize is millions of dollars of unearned money? Every move he had ever made in his life would be so scrutinized and so distorted out of proportion, that any minor mistake he had made in the past (and in some cases, not a mistake) would be dredged up for use by those who have no scruples about the lives they must destroy in order to win and maintain political power. Ever wonder why political campaigns are so vicious and why dishonest and inaccurate campaign ads are created? Wouldn't you lie if the prize were millions of dollars? Wouldn't you defame the honesty and integrity of any man who got in your way--especially the honest politician? (Well, I wouldn't, but then, I wouldn’t go into politics.)

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