It’s a Conundrum

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We have become obsessed with government regulation to keep us safe.  We impose these regulations on our producers, manufacturers and industries to the point we drive production overseas where we have absolutely no visibility on how things are done.

Then we set our priorities on paying for big programs, with managers for managers and assistants to the managers, so that when budgets are built the workers themselves are too expensive and the work force is reduced to the point where we only randomly inspect goods coming into our country.  Then we wonder how dangerous stuff gets into our products.  In our zeal to protect ourselves – have we?

We complain about how the rich get richer, while the poor stay poor.  We set up vast bureaucracies to redistribute wealth.  Unfortunately the tax code regulations, written, rewritten, modified and amended over the past 100 years, are a vast hodge-podge of rules established to fund the government while encouraging business, and perhaps protect those whose political favor is sought by the politicians.  Because of this, the wealth distribution really only happens between the middle class and the poor while the rich are able to maneuver within the labyrinth of shelters and loop holes.

We now talk about more taxing of the 1%; unfortunately 99% of the people who say that don’t have a clue as to what it means because they are the self-same ones who say their taxes are too high.  They clamor on the backs of the political operatives who’ve found someone to blame for our problems.  They are inflaming the passions of people who want everything - but want someone else to pay for it, just as they did when they argued that taxes were too high in California and pushed for Proposition 13.  We don’t like to pay taxes so let’s not!  Of course what was a jewel of a State University system back then -- isn’t anymore and the entire infrastructure of the state is questionable, but so many people know what is right let’s just do all their right things, even if we don’t have funds, heck it is only debt and that’s someone else’s problem isn’t it? 

Then we come to the protections of the Constitution.  Historically we viewed the Constitution as not only the framework for our government, but in its amendments the bedrock of protections of the individual against the transgressions of the state.  Now we seek to use those protections to bludgeon the individual when their wishes run counter to the loudest voices of the political movements, and we do so through a willing court system that carries those self-same political agendas.  It is for some - more important to get their way then to protect the concept of independence and individuality, so in the name of some cause they are willing to sacrifice their freedoms, one same step at a time.

History has shown political movements are like pendulums.  Swinging first one way; then the other with increasing movement to the extreme, until something cataclysmic forces them to reset.  It is inevitable, just a matter of time before it happens.  Then what?

It is indeed a conundrum.