Tag: Growing Government

The decision you make has the potential to change forever, the relationship between our state citizens and their governments.  It will grow the number of those who will become dependent on a system that has never kept a promise, met efficiency targets, or solved the problems that it was designed to do.  It will bind us contractually to a leviathan federal bureaucracy that has inserted itself as not only our caretakers, but now as our keepers; and our masters.

Yet this decision is difficult for some of you?

Some on the fence claim that "other states will get our cut", as if that makes it right to ink a deal with the devil.  Some say "this helps our books out", ignoring the fact that its all borrowed money or time.  We WILL be paying for it after only a couple years, and given the gimmicks the feds are using to find financing to pay for this temporary buy-off, we see that money source might not be so reliable.  Some say that "the hospitals build in the costs of indigent care to paying patients". yet forget to remind us that hospitals have advantages granted by local governments to offset those costs.

Gains from agreeing to this might be a temporarily solvent budget, a few legislative measures considered as part-of-the-deal, or even a bunch of happy big-hospital lobbyists. In the 1800s, FRÉDÉRIC BASTIAT book "the law", described the latter:

"The Fatal Idea of Legal Plunder
But on the other hand, imagine that this fatal principle has been introduced: Under the pretense of organization, regulation, protection, or encouragement, the law takes property from one person and gives it to another; the law takes the wealth of all and gives it to a few--whether farmers, manufacturers, shipowners, artists, or comedians. Under these circumstances, then certainly every class will aspire to grasp the law, and logically so."

Providing for unlimited new expansions in safety nets only creates new dependencies. In turn building new provisions for new needs.  It demonstrates a distrust in one's fellow man to provide for him or herself.  It shows a fear of the unknown result of true independence, like the type exhibited who once upon a time fought against such mechanisms.  Indeed, it is growth of government, regular and expected, that now happens nearly without counter action. It grows and consumes like a beast.  Anyone can step aside and watch that beast maul its victims without stepping in to distract, scare, or engage.

Yet as long as the beast is loose, it simply becomes more emboldened and finds more victims.