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Nash Airstyle Ad touts 25 mpg

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ws7Zp41fByE

Join me as I look at what they thought big government was in 1949 and laugh at it:

Hoover Commission, 1949

If you ran your own business the way the Federal Government is run, you’d probably go broke.

That’s the inescapable conclusion to be drawn from the Hoover Commission’s study of our Government. The Commission’s reports for the 81st Congress show thousands of examples that might well lead to waste and inefficiency – such examples as these:

1. It took a Government agency several months and cost $5,000 to comply with an order to cut its employees from 7,000 to 5,000. Paper work is so voluminous that the tendency in government is to keep an inefficient employee rather than to go through the red tape necessary to dismiss him.

2. Thirty-eight different government agencies lend money.

3. Sixteen different government agencies are engaged in wildlife preservation.

4. The Bureau of Indian Affairs in the Department of the Interior has 393,000 Indians under its jurisdiction or care. It employs 12,269 persons to administer its program. That’s one employee for every 32 Indians.

5. The Veterans Administration requires an average of 73 days to pay death claims on Government life insurance. Whereas private insurance companies pay about 80 per cent of their death claims within 15 days after receipt of satisfactory proof of death.

6. Toll rates on the Panama Canal in 1948 were the same as they were 10 years earlier, in 1938, despite the fact that expenses were up 79 per cent.

7. The Army tore down a camp in Alaska that cost $16,000,000. It shipped the lumber to Seattle, Wash. The Department of the Interior got the lumber in Seattle and shipped it back to a point 10 miles from where it was.

On and on they go, these stories about what’s wrong with the business of government. You and other Americans are paying $40,658,000,000 to keep it going.

–William B. Arthur, Look [em. mine]

Boy, all that sounds really familiar doesn’t it. It goes on:

By its own admission, it employs 2,090,554 civilian workers, with an annual payroll of more than $6,000,000.000. Its 1,816 separate bureaus and agencies occupy 46,865 separate offices whose combined area is equal in size to the area of 170 buildings like the Empire State. It took 1,353 pages of fine print in a book weighing six pounds, five ounces to present the budget estimates of your government’s business for 1949 fiscal year operations.

It has a debt of $252,435,000,000. That’s equal to an obligation of $1,722 for every person in the country. It costs more than five billion dollars a year just to pay the interest on that debt. That’s more than the annual cost of operating the entire Federal Government in the years before 1934, except for the war budgets of 1918-21.

–William B. Arthur, Look [em. mine]

How do all those stats compare to government today? Well, I tried to get a handle on how many total civilian Federal employees there are now but found it practically impossible. I did find a bunch of articles listing the Federal head counts, but they were all different. Some varied by as much as 600,000. And, all of them didn’t include large portions of Homeland Security. Then, when you compare that with this article saying that DHS contractors outnumber actual employees you just have to throw your hands up and ball park it at somewhere around 4.5 million for all 3 branches, excluding military. But, who really knows.

What about total Federal payroll? The latest figures we have are for 2009 by the Census Bureau. It gives annual payroll as around $15 billion per month for the 2.8 million employees listed. Since we know that 2.8 million figure is dubious and it’s been two years since those figures were accurate, we can safely assume the total Federal payroll is well over $200 billion. But, again, who really knows.

How many pages are in the 2011 Federal budget? You can download the entire thing as a collection of 25 PDF files. The total page count is around 3500 pages.

And what about debt. Well, this one is just laughable. The current Federal debt is $14.2 trillion. The entire 1949 debt load fits into the “.2″ of our current debt. And paying the interest on that debt cost us $413,954,825,362.17 in 2010. That’s equal to $46,103 of debt for every man, woman and child in this country. It takes $1,344 per person just to pay the interest on the national debt.

Oh, to be 1949 again.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A1MASsKbWQs

The problem that faces our country today, the last 30 years we have lived off the future, and the bill is coming due.

I think you’ll see a 15 to 18 percent unemployment rate. I think you will see an 8 to 9 percent decline in GDP. I think you’ll see the middle class just destroyed if we don’t do this. And the people that it will harm the most will be the poorest of the poor, because we’ll print money to try to debase our currency and get out of it and what you will see is hyperinflation.

If we didn’t take some pain now, we’re going to experience apocalyptic pain, and it’s going to be out of our control. The idea should be that we control it.

We have 267 job training programs across 39 different agencies. Why do we have 267 of them? We have 105 programs to encourage people to go into science and technology, engineering and math. That’s 105 sets of bureaucrats. None of them have metrics on it.

The Pentagon can’t even audit its own books. It doesn’t even know where its money is going. And we refuse to have the tough forces go on the Pentagon so that at least they are efficient with the money they’re spending.

The very fact that we have $1.1 trillion in tax expenditures every year that directs capital in a way that the government says it should be directed rather than the way it should be directed based on markets, tells us that we have a terrible tax system.

I don’t care if you’re rich or poor, liberal or conservative. If we don’t fix the problems in front of us, everybody is going to pay a significant price.

The history of republics is they average 200 years of life. And they all fail in the history over fiscal matters. They rot from within before they collapse or are attacked.

–Tom Coburn, Fox News Interview

All modern societies have come to agree that we need some government regulations to prevent fraud and injustice in business transactions. It is necessary, for example, for government to enforce contracts(so that people have to keep the agreements they make). And it is necessary for governments to impose some health and safety standards on the sale of medicines and foods or other products such as bicycles and cars. It is necessary for government to enforce health and cleanliness regulations on public restaurants. And some government regulation is necessary for weights and measures, so that the gasoline pump really does put one gallon of gasoline in my car when one gallon registers on the dial, and so that a gallon of milk really does contain one gallon of milk. Such regulations and others like them are necessary because it would simply be impractical, if not impossible, for individuals to attempt to check all such things for themselves before buying an item.

 

–Wayne Grudem, Politics – According to The Bible

So that’s Grudem’s argument in favor of certain government regulation as “necessary.” Let’s analyze his main position first, and then we’ll dive into those specific examples he gave next time.

“All modern societies have come to agree that we need some government regulations to prevent fraud and injustice in business transactions.”

There are a few problems with this statement in the way he means it. Firstly, just because lots of people agree on something doesn’t mean it’s true, or accurate. This should be more clear now than ever before in light of the global warming “consensus” that ended up being a total fraud. And, isn’t that the constant cry of the atheist: “everyone agrees that macro-evolution is true, so you’re crazy not to accept it.” Consensus on any topic isn’t an argument. It’s just a state of affairs.

But, even in light of that, it isn’t clear to me that there is a general consensus on the necessity of government regulation anyway. Just because a certain state of affairs exists(in this case government regulations exist in almost all developed countries), it doesn’t mean that there is a corresponding agreement among those that are subject to it that it’s the best state of affairs. In fact, if you interviewed individual businesses within each sector of the economy, I bet you’d find that every one would say the regulations they fall under are unnecessary. Talk to any businessman you know and listen to how they rail against burdensome government oversight. The “agreement” that Grudem speaks of seems only to exist within the realm of those doing the regulating.

This leads into the second problem with Grudem’s statement. He says that government regulation is necessary to “prevent fraud and injustice in business transactions.” Again, if you talk to business owners about their respective business sectors you will hear them complain about how ineffective the regulations they face are. They would argue that it’s not regulations that ensure a quality product. It’s their customers and competition. In other words, it’s the market, not the government that keeps constant pressure on businesses to ensure product quality. Grudem even ascents to this later in the same section:

(a) A free market is better than government control at producing goods and services. The economic “goods” that the free market produces are of better quality, at a lower price, and are the goods that people actually want rather than the goods that some government agency tells them they should want. This can be seen by numerous examples in recent history.

–Wayne Grudem, Politics – According to The Bible

So his position appears to be that the market, as opposed to government, provides superior products at superior prices, but also would cheat their customers with low quality products at unsatisfactory prices without government control. Huh?

And the other side of that is the assumption that government regulations actually do what they say they will do. The old axiom that “ought” implies “can” comes in to play here. If government regulation is necessary, then it seems one of the prerequisites for that necessity is that those regulations are actually capable of achieving the intended results. In fact, this is rarely the case. Any person on the street can cite you multiple examples of how government regulation has failed. Whether its Bernie Madoff, Enron or any one of a hundred more small scale examples, the government routinely shows that it’s inherently incapable of acting as an appropriate check on market fraud.

We’ll go into more detail tomorrow.

“Whoever in our government leaked that information is guilty of treason and I think anything less than execution is too kind a penalty,” stated Huckabee matter-of-factly, saying that person has “blood” on their hands and would be “personally responsible” for any lives they put in danger.

–Erik Hayden, The Atlantic

But, hold up. Let’s not let Sarah Palin off the hook:

His sentiment echoes that of Sarah Palin, who labeled the document deluge a “treasonous act” that the U.S. needed to use “all necessary means” to defeat.

–Erik Hayden, The Atlantic

Hey conservatives. Here are your “small government” candidates for 2012. I’m not sure how you have “small government” when you also want to empower that government with the right to kill you for speaking things it doesn’t like.

“The way to make government responsible is to hold it accountable. And the way to make government accountable is make it transparent so that the American people can know exactly what decisions are being made, how they’re being made, and whether their interests are being well served.

…For a long time now, there’s been too much secrecy in this city…That era is now over. Starting today, every agency and department should know that this administration stands on the side not of those who seek to withhold information but those who seek to make it known.”

–Obama Press Conf (1/21/2009)

Obama from 2 days ago (11/29/2010):

Striking back, the Obama administration branded the WikiLeaks release of more than a quarter-million sensitive files an attack on the United States Monday and raised the prospect of criminal prosecutions in connection with the exposure. The Pentagon detailed new security safeguards, including restraints on small computer flash drives, to make it harder for any one person to copy and reveal so many secrets.

–Anne Gearan, AP

Who knew that when he said “change” he meant himself? All you main street liberals out there, please remember that those Democrat leaders you think are on your side aren’t. They will always side with the state. You don’t have “a guy” in office that represents you. Nobody does.

[H.T. David Kramer at LRC]

With Amazon it took less than 24 hours to concede to it’s customers and pull the offending book off it’s virtual shelves.

The TSA on the other hand is flipping us the finger and saying sorry, deal with it. We have guns. You don’t. End of story. Now bend over or we will fine you.

The market exists to satisfy it’s customers. The state exists to extort and control it’s “customers.” For all of you big government neo-liberals out there that love to rail about the evils of Walmart, remember this: when you complain about Walmart’s policies, they don’t imprison, taze or kill you. And for all of you big military loving neo-conservatives out there that think the state must “keep us safe,” this is what you get. The state doesn’t deal in common sense or moderation. It deals in brutality and force. And it’s the existence of a huge military that gives the state the balls to do things like this to it’s own people.

I’ve already decided that I’ll never fly again until this stuff stops, if ever. There’s no way in hell I’m letting some government thug molest my kid right in front of me or put them through some child porn scanner. These are scary times folks.