Government 101

The American spirit was born of a revolution. We are strongly individual. It is how our nation was born. Rugged individuals took their lives in their hands and at great risk, traveled westward to build a new country. And with them, they brought their rugged, common sense approach to the problems they faced.

From the very beginning, it would seem, we hated government, not just big government, but any government. The colonists left England because they either didn’t want to be told what church they could attend, or they wanted opportunities that were only available to the wealthiest class of people back home. Of course, once they got here, they immediately started to dictate which church you could attend, and began to limit the opportunities of others. That shouldn’t really seem so odd. After all, the children of child abusers usually become child abusers themselves. It’s the only model they have.

We even fought our own government in the early days of our federal government. Americans were forced to fire on Americans in Shay’s Rebellion. Americans have always resented government. It seems to be in our blood. The rest of the world doesn’t really have any problem with government. For most of them, government has been pretty good, overall (with the exception of some nasty people who ran Germany for a short while). Europeans look at our dislike for government and think we’re nuts. In Europe, the idea is that government is supposed to take care of the people. Here, we seem to feel that government should stay out of our way.

One big difference for this is the nature of our country compared with the nations of Europe at the time our country began. We had a sparse population. There were fewer than 300,000 people living in American when we became a country. Europe was crowded, at least in the urban centers. Where there are large numbers of people, you need to have lots of regulations. This is because people bother other people. Your neighbors are close by and you can’t do shit that bothers them. People in Europe saw new religions as a threat to the established order. We didn’t really have an established order. Our country was founded with disdain for an established order. We could do that. We didn’t have that many people. You could stay out of other people’s way. Nobody cares what you do when you’re miles away from anybody else.

Our country grew rapidly because there were no regulations. And while we did become a wealthy nation in general (not everybody did so well—ask the Indians and the slaves, along with scads of poor whites), it was done so with a total disregard for the rights and well being of others. Just ask the Chinese workers who came here to help build the railroad. A lot of people became rich by fucking over other people who didn’t have the resources to stand up for themselves and their rights.

But poor people have a way of multiplying. Eventually, the poor people grew strong enough to demand their rights. And in guaranteeing those rights, the government, which was created to “promote the general welfare”, regulations had to be put into place. The wealthy business owners objected to this, of course. And so the Pinkertons, and other, official, law enforcement agencies were brought in to try to put an end to the labor movement, and women’s suffrage, and any other movement that, you guessed it, threatened the established order. We had become Europe. But of course we became Europe. We now had all the trappings of Europe. We had our own aristocracy, and aristocracy of money, instead of nobility.

Although we had all the trappings of our European fathers (and mothers), we still had the American disdain for government. And yet the only protection the little guy has is from government. There are many in our country who would try to do away with all the protections put in place by FDR in the 30s. Some say we should do away with social security and let people invest their money the way they want, without government interference. Well, my wife and I have already lost about twenty grand from our retirement accounts in just the past two weeks. Imagine if everybody’s retirement plans were based solely on investments. It’s true that many government retirement plans are invested in the market and have lost money, but the average social security recipient is going to receive his or her monthly pension regardless of what happened in the market. Of that much, they can be sure, for now at least.

Businesses cry out (especially small businesses, and I understand why) at all the regulations that protect workers on the job. Those protections cost money and make it hard to make a profit at all. But without those protections, workers are in danger of significant threats to life and limb. As long as there is money to be made, businesses are willing to put people’s health and well being at risk.

Now I know that there are many small business owners who would never consider putting their employees at risk. But there are plenty more that would, and that’s why we need regulations. I guess my point is that we are no longer the small country we once were. We no longer have limitless resources. And, with the kind of population we now have, what we do to the environment really matters. We are a lot more like Europe than we used to be. We have huge urban centers now. Almost 81% of the population of the United States live in an urban center. In 1790, 95% of the population lived in the countryside. Only 5% lived in cities. We are not the same nation we once were. That’s why we need regulations.

So in the end, we have to overcome our intense hatred of government. When you have lots of people, you need government, and we have lots of people now. When you have lots of people that live in cities, you need government. I hear McCain and Palin say over and over again that they are opposed to government. They want to get government out of our lives. And a part of me likes that idea, in the same way that children want mom and dad out of their lives. But children need mom and dad in their lives to make sure they don’t do stupid shit. Nobody likes being told what to do or what not to do. But sometimes it’s necessary.

FDR got us out of the depression because he used government to step in and put people to work. Yes, it was the war that eventually got the U.S. out of the great depression, but thanks to the New Deal, FDR did finally bring the GNP of the U.S. back up to where it was before the market crash of 1929 by 1936. FDR was not willing to create the kind of deficits necessary to totally get us out of the depression until the war made in unavoidable. Either way, it was government that saved our parents’ and grandparents’ asses back in the great depression. And it will be government that saves us now, as long as government makes the right decisions.

Two things, I think, have become clear. One, we have to quit thinking of the kind of country we once were. We are not that country anymore. We can’t move forward as long as we keep looking back. And two, we have to quit thinking of the government as the bad guy. The government is only the bad guy when we put the wrong people in power. And to my mind, the wrong people are the ones who keep putting the interests of the minority, the 1% who own 30% of the wealth of the nation ahead of the other 99% of the people that live here. And I’m not sure there is anybody speaking for those 99% at all. As Ralph Nader so correctly claims, both the democrats and the republicans represent that 1%. The rest of the free world has government in their lives. And they don’t mind.

I suspect that out of this current economic crisis we will see the eventual coming of a totally new system. I suspect that what we are seeing is the collapse of capitalism, just as we saw the collapse of communism. Neither system works anymore. And what we will end up with is some kind of mixture of limited capitalism and socialism. It is up to us to make sure that the rights of individual continue to be respected. And it could well be that those people who want to have the opportunity to make their riches, those opportunities that were once available in this country, this shining city on the hill, will have to go someplace else that is, like America was, sparsely populated. You go where there is nothing and build something. Perhaps they will colonize Mars. Who knows?

But we will become like the rest of the democratic world. We will become like Germany, like Ireland, like France, like the rest of the European Union. Government will become more involved in business and in our private lives. There will be more regulations and higher taxes. It may come soon, or after a terrible new depression, but it will happen. The only question that remains is how many of our rights will we still have? Will we be like England, or will we be like China? Personally, I vote for England, where government is considered your friend. I may have to pay higher taxes, but at least I won’t have to worry about starving or not having a roof over my head.