Hope and Change, Pt. 3

Continued from Here.

Begins Here.

Perhaps a better question is, Que Bono? Who benefits?

Freedomistas, myself included, are often guilty of the fault of thinking of government as this great monolithic leviathan, intent on kicking sand in our faces and stealing our lunch money. In effect there's probably some truth to this. But in detail, there isn't. "Government," said the fictional Shepherd Book, "is a collection of individuals, notably ungoverned." From the highest elected office in the land to the lowest department clerk they're just people. Those people have separate, though usually compatible, agendas. When we see the things for which they battle among themselves, we can perceive the purpose of the whole. That is power. Turf. Status. Government is the quest for the corner office, writ large in letters of blood.

If you're like me, raised in the typical middle-class way, you grew up believing that our rulers were qualified to make the big decisions for us by virtue of their superior knowledge. But this turns out to be untrue: Look at the lessons we've learned about how often congressmen actually read the weighty laws on which they so wisely vote, or about the abstracted and often highly biased 'intelligence briefs' on the basis of which the president makes decisions that can bring death to hundreds of thousands. Where is this superior knowledge?

Nowhere, that's where. Government - at whatever level we care to examine it - is just a bunch of schmoes exactly like us in every way save one: They sought and obtained some measure of power over their fellow men. Each one of them will of course phrase this differently. They're not rulers; what a thought! No, they're public servants. They only seek to serve the public good. The public good, of course, demands that they personally be in a position of power. And they must have the resources they need to do the good they envision. Which brings us back to those trillions.

To be continued...