If I asked you a simple question, what government organization works well, what would you say?  Let’s take a look at two government organizations and compare their effectiveness and motivation.

The Military

Whether you support our troops on the battlefield or want them to always stay home in their barracks, most Americans will say the military does a pretty good job.  Why? That is, why are they effective, not just why do people think so?  Well, they put a lot of investment in training and technology.  They seem to have solved the problem of integration, being based on merit rather than racial prejudice.  These are all important things, but I don’ t they get to the core of the issue.  The key question is, what happens if they don’t do their job?  They die…they die, the guy beside them dies, their buddies die, and depending on the size of the conflict, their families and country may eventually die.  With that kind of motivation, race is not even secondary.  If the guy next to me has got my back and I have his, I don’t care what color he or she is.  We do it right, we live;  we don’t, we die.

The K-12 Teacher

K-12 education comes under fire in this country, and rightly so, for failing to produce an educated workforce.  In New York, for example we spend over $14,000 per student, per year on education, far above the national average of around $9,000.  Are students in New York 50% smarter than the country in general?  Hardly.  Is the nation as a whole turning out well educated students?  Sadly, no.

Our K-12 public schools are a government run monopoly.  So what happens to a K-12 teacher if they fail to do their job?  If they have been in the job long enough to get tenure, nothing.  They will get a raise like everyone else.  So what motivates them to turn out outstanding students?  I’ll wait.

Let me be clear that I don’t want to lump all teachers together.  They are many teachers who, by having what  I suppose is a strong moral streak,  do a great job because they want to teach.  Okay, so let’s look at the teaching profession where there is a group that does their best because they get satisfaction from doing a good job.  Now, some studies come out that say the way to improve results is smaller classroom size.  The teachers’ unions get behind it and eventually push it through.  So what does that mean?  If you cut the size of the class in half, you double the number of classes.  If you double the number of classes, you have to double the number of teachers and thus have to go deeper into the labor pool to find them.  Before you took this step, we can probably assume that all the self-motivated teachers were already on the job.  So the additional teachers are motivated by what?

Co -conspirators

That brings us back to the teachers’ unions.  When government’s come under pressure to cut educational expenses, the airwaves are soon flooded with the heart wrenching commercials pleading to restore the funding “for the children’s sake.”  What you don’t hear is the trailer that says, “This commercial paid for by the PTA,” or “This commercial paid for by the Association of Concerned Parents.”  No, what you typically hear is, “This commercial paid for by the X Teacher’s union, Joe Blow, President.”

Who do the unions really represent…really? The students? or the teachers?  They want the funds restored so that their membership is not hurt and their dues are not curtailed.  If their true concern was for the students, why not support school vouchers and charter schools?  They fight the former with a vengeance and the latter, if it is not union organized.

Let’s Not Pick on K-12 Education

Let’s look at other government areas.  Government is the only area where union membership is growing.  How many people relish going to their Department of Motor Vehicles?  How efficient is the Post Office?  Amtrak?  Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have a bonus compensation plan, which is a step in the right direction unless it leads to cooking the books and making extremely risky loans that lead to the near collapse of our economy.  How can we get this under control?

Controlling the Uncontrollable

Our government is trying to install a massive health care program that will cost a trillion dollars.  At the same time, tens of billions of dollars are stolen from Medicare every year and they can’t stop it.  Early this year, the Obama Administration passed a $787 billion stimulus package, spent $18 million to build a website to track it, and put Joe Biden in the role of watch dog.  How is that working out?  A recent report from ABC News, of all places, found that credit for creating jobs was given on the web site to Congressional Districts that do not exist.  A $1,000 grant was purported to have created 50 jobs.  The New York Times investigated and found that the $1,000 went to purchase a lawn mower.  It took from the time of the founding of the Republic until about the mid 1990s to accumulate $6 trillion in debt.  It has doubled since then, and it is projected to go from $12 trillion to $14 trillion by next year!

It cannot be controlled.  It is impossible to control.  The only solution is to cut the federal government down to size.  Take out the Constitution and read what the true functions of government are supposed to be.  The military, absolutely;  the Post Office, yes it’s in there; coin money; establish patents and copyrights; establish the courts; control the District of Columbia; regulate interstate commerce; make treaties; give the State of the Union address.  That pretty much sums it up and everything else should be left to the states and local government or the people.

We should jettison all the rest and cut this government down to size and get out of debt.  Department of Labor–gone;  Department of Health and Human Services–gone; Department ment of Housing and Urban Development–gone; Department of Transportation–gone; Department of Energy–gone; Depatrment of Education–gone; Department of Veterans Affairs–gone, rolled into the Department of Defense;  Department of Homeland Security–gone, rolled into the Department of Defense; Department of the Interior–gone; Department of Agriculture–gone.

The amount of money saved would be enormous.  Selling all the real estate and buildings would bring in more money.  We could then cut taxes to jump start the economy and run a surplus to cut the debt.  The next step would be to make it illegal for unions to organize government workers without a referendum approved by all the voters.  Side benefits would be less campaign money because there would be less government to influence.  Government would be more accountable to the people because it would be closer to the people, that is, at the state level or local level.  We can do this proactively, or wait until the government is bankrupt and we have to sell off the parts to the Chinese.

A news story this morning gave me that uneasy, pit of the stomach feeling again.  It probably shouldn’t have since it was about Venezuela.  Hugo Chavez got the term limit restriction lifted in his country that will allow him to be president for life.  That measure had previously failed but now it passed by a wide margin.  So why am I feeling uneasy about our liberties and what is going on in this country?  Here are some of my concerns.

Bipartisanship

After all the talk of bipartisanship by candidate Obama and the need to change the tone in Washington, the reality was something completely different.  In a so called “stimulus package” that will triple the budget deficit and was rammed through the Congress with no one, and I repeat no one, reading it, one party was virtually shut out of the legislative process.  At the same time 44% of the American people, in a Rasmussen poll, said names picked at random out of the phone book could do a better job on the economy than this Congress.  This package is chock full of 40 years of liberal programs that could not pass muster on their own, but as Rahm Emmanuel says, “You never want a serious crisis go to waste.”  When  Republicans protested about being shut out of the process, the response from the other side was, “We won.”

Fairness Doctrine

In the movie there will come a scene when the incoming powers break into the newspaper offices and smash the printing press, overturn the typesetting table, dump papers on the floor and set them ablaze.  The message is clear, there will be no opposition press.  There is only one message and that is of the new dictator and the new news will be his indoctrination.

Today, there is more and more talk about reviving the Fairness Doctrine.  Here is what former President Bill Clinton said:

“Well, you either ought to have the Fairness Doctrine or we ought to have more balance on the other side,” Clinton said, “because essentially there’s always been a lot of big money to support the right wing talk shows and let face it, you know, Rush Limbaugh is fairly entertaining even when he is saying things that I think are ridiculous….”

Liberals tried to bring balance to the discussion with Air America and it failed dismally.  Why?  People didn’t want to listen to left wing rants all day.  But face it, the main stream media overwhelmingly votes liberal.  So although no one will be smashing printing presses and torching newsrooms, the objective is to stifle the conservative point of view.  Once you do that the only voice that is heard is reinforcing the new ruler.

What the First Amendment says is:

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, or the right of the people to peaceably assemble, and to petition the Government for the redress of grievances.”

Congress shall make no law…so what are they doing? The line between news and opinion has long been crossed.  It used to be you couldn’t tell what Walter Cronkite’s politics were, because he kept his opinions, for the most part, out of the news.  But today there is little difference.  For a great example see this piece by Russ Roberts. (They Report. I Edit. You Decide). They will defend the Fairness Doctrine by saying it is not censorship, but here’s the dirty little secret.

Let’s say you are a radio program manager and you put on three hours of Rush Limbaugh.  Great show. Great ratings. You make lots of money.  Now along comes the Fairness Doctrine.  You don’t have to touch Rush’s show because that would be censorship.  What you have to do, however, is give three hours over to Air America to be “fair”.  Three hours of Air America hate <fill in the blank: Bush, religion, gun owners, pro life> rants.  Ratings for those three hours go in the tank.  No revenue. You’re making no money.  Listener’s start complaining.  So what is a station manager to do?  It’s what they used to do when the Fairness Doctrine was here before, tell Rush he has to close up shop, dump the Air America crowd and play Top 40s songs all day long.  The fact that it wasn’t censorship doesn’t matter, the effect is the same.

The Census

The census, conducted every ten years, is important in two regards.  One, it helps allocate how money from government programs is distributed, and it determines how the number of Congressional seats will be apportioned among the states.  Based on current estimates states like New York (Blue) will lose one or two seats and states like Texas (Red) will gain seats.  That could mean a shift in power from the Democrats to the Republicans.  Uh oh.

The scene in the movie shifts to a darkened office with a light over the conference table.  “We cannot allow the opposition to gain any strength back, we have to consolidate our power.  What do we do?”

“Comrade, we can take control of the census.  Under our control we can count homeless people and illegal immigrants in Blue states and ignore them in Red states.”

“Brilliant!  You see that the census is directed out of your office rather than in some Department.”

You chuckle only for a minute, when you realize that Rahm Emmanuel will be overseeing the census, operating out of the White House, rather than handling it in the Commerce Department as it has been done for years.  Suddenly, the scene seems very real.

The Stimulus and ACORN

In the so called “stimulus bill” there appears to be about $4.1 billion for “neighborhood stabilization activities.”  The money was initially limited to state and local governments but later changed to include non-profits, such as ACORN.  ACORN is surrounded by allegations of vote fraud.  It doesn’t take much of an imagination to understand how close races can be tipped by an organization that perpetuates voter fraud.  Now think about how your tax dollars are being funneled to them to do it.

We Need More Votes in The House.  So Let’s Add a Representative

In consolidating power, what better way than adding votes where you need them.  One way is to add a representative in the House for the District of Columbia.  It is a heavily Democratic district, so why not?  The Constitution? Ignore it.  Just go ahead pass a law.  If the Republicans object, just crank up the racist machine.

Handouts

Of all the tried and tested methods for turning around an economy in trouble, the Democrats seem to be picking all the ones proved not to work.  If you want to stimulate the economy through tax cuts, you cut marginal tax rates.  Instead the Democrats want to give rebates to people who pay no income taxes.  That’s welfare not tax cuts.  But the goal is not to turn around the economy.  The goal is to consolidate power.  What better way than to make sure more than 50% get something from the government and less than 50% are stuck with the bill.  Majority rules.  We won.  Once that threshold is crossed, the majority can start jacking up taxes on those evil rich, so that the “working and middle class” get checks from the government.  Comrade, it from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs.

Calling Dr. Mengele

In the movie a sinister doctor approaches the “patient” and plans how he is going to improve life for all of us.  For the “patient”, not so much.

Another provision in the stimulus bill is to establish a new bureaucracy that will “compare drugs, medical devices, surgery and other ways of treating specific conditions.”  This organization will take a role in your medical treatment that was formerly between you and your doctor. “Supporters of the research hope it will eventually save money by discouraging the use of costly, ineffective treatments.”  Isn’t that what medical journals are for?  Isn’t that why the AMA has conferences, to share such information?

“I’m sorry Mrs. Jones, we think you child has Down’s Syndrome, therefore you really must have the abortion, or your medical bills for your childbearing treatment won’t be covered by our national health care.  And you know the costs run into the hundreds of thousands.  What would you like to do?”

Do you really want some bureaucrat in Washington playing with a statistics program  telling your doctor what treatment he can and cannot perform to treat you?

Is This Real?

As you leave the theatre you laugh nervously that this couldn’t happen here.  But every time you pick up a newspaper, the similarity about how a dictator seizes control and then consolidates his power is just too eerie.  But as we have seen in the Soviet Union, China, Cuba, and now in Venezuela, it can happen and once it does it may be decades before it can be undone, if at all.  The Founding Fathers were very wary of a strong central government.  They believed that the only powers that the Federal government should have are limited and they went to the trouble to spell them out in the Tenth Amendment:

“The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”

Where does it say in the Constitution that education is a federal function? I’m not against education by any stretch of the imagination, but how can the federal government do a better job than the local school board?  Why is the federal government putting cops on the street?  Shouldn’t each municipality handle this? The Federal Government has gotten too big and too powerful.  It is so vast no one can manage it.  We keep pushing so much up to the federal level we are almost begging for a dictatorship to form.  And with everything they take, and they will take all they can grab, your liberties go with it.

We better wake up, people, and start cutting this monster down to size.  Otherwise it will either consume all of us leaving nothing but a wasteland, or we will be reading our founding documents and see that they are telling to prepare for the Second American Revolution.

If the residents of Washington, D.C. want representation in Congress there are ways of going about it:
1) Return the District of Columbia to Maryland. In that way they will be counted in the population of Maryland for the apportionment of representatives and will be represented in both the House and the Senate;
2) Make Washington, D.C. the 51st state; there is a process for this that should be followed.

But to just say, okay, let’s add another seat to the House of Representatives is unconstitutional. The District of Columbia was specifically formed in the Constitution, to change it would require an Amendment to the Constitution