What's So Good About Government Anyway?

From National Polemic & National Polemic Cultural Forums

In 1860, Abraham Lincoln’s Republican Party gained power by opposing the expansion of slavery. For the first time, the nation was split over an issue that affected the political liberties of the States, the role of the federal government, the national economy, and the identity of the nation at the same time. The result was the failed secession attempt by eleven southern states under the banner of the Confederate Flag and the leadership of Jefferson Davis. What began as a war over the State’s Right to Slavery, ended with a divide in the national conscience between the idea of State’s Rights and Federal authority.

In 1928, a global depression struck the first industrialized nations, and by October 29th, 1929, the Great Depression reached Wall Street in New York City, the effects of which would reverberate around the nation over the following months and years. Nearly every nation turned to their governments to save them from what must have seemed like the end of their economic world, with no hope of salvation. While the Russians pursued the collectivization of the peasants, the Germans turned to Adolph Hitler. The Americans, quickly turned to Franklin D. Roosevelt. But everyone turned to government.

Historians gave our politicians mixed reviews. Both Adolph Hitler and Franklin Roosevelt were credited with saving their national economies through the centralization of government and the use of government programs to direct and focus the energies of the nations. Of course, we ended up losing millions of men in a global war, but I suppose no government is perfect. Other historians have blamed FDR for extending the Great Depression. But one thing was certain, the torch of Big Government and centralized power in the United States was passed from the anti-Slavery Republicans to the anti-Business Democrats.

Banks, Businesses, Industrialists, and rich people in general, were demonized by the Roosevelt Administration and the general cultural affection shifted from a fierce loyalty to “freedom” by individuals fighting for self-reliance in a capitalist world to an overall appreciation for the good works of government and the great society such works seemed to promise. The legacy of FDR and the promise of a government-manufactured Great Society, would be the banner of the Democratic Party up to the present day.

Today, government has grown so large that citizens of the worlds’ industrialized nations work more days out of each year paying for their government than they do paying for their own lives. I suppose we should all be grateful that up until resent years, the capitalist economies have been growing faster than Government. Just as the whole world felt the burden of the Great Depression in the late 1920s, today the whole world is beginning to feel the burdensome weight of their governments. Sadly, in a miserable turn of human fortune, people are not looking at this problem from the perspective that we can no longer afford our governments. Rather, the people have become convinced that governments can no longer afford them, and, once again, the governments of the world are blaming the bankers, businessmen, industrialists, and rich people in general for the all the worlds’ woes, while claiming no real culpability themselves.

We need to raise the taxes on the rich, they tell us, in order to provide all those services We the People have begged from them over the years. Some industries just won’t play ball either, so we’ll need some more regulation of the capitalist economy and any offensive profits must be confiscated by the government on behalf of the people. The people are hurting, after all, and its the governments job to protect us. Therefore, we must hurt the people who aren’t hurting. Not in any long term strategy to improve the future of our economy, but in the short term interest of capitalizing on the wealth-envy of the poorer masses struggling to sustain their standard of living in the face of rising food, energy, and health care prices.

Today, we may be witnessing the next great turmoil in Western Civilization where the citizens of the Industrialized world will be forced to choose their allegiances and redefine their ideologies. While individualists, libertarians, and capitalists don’t have hardly any ground left to defend, they may be our only bulwark and rampart against the tidal waves of government. The only hope for individualists, libertarians, and capitalists is that people begin asking the question, “What’s so good about government anyway?”.

Meanwhile, our governments are proposing higher taxes, increased regulation, greater centralization of government (both nationally and internationally), and a wider proliferation of complex systems of political and economic controls over the peoples of the Western World. The banks and multinational corporations have done their own analysis and have chosen to latch on to governments, believing their survival to be intimately linked to their government connections and their own lobbying power. For the average citizen, however, there is still time to choose. Choose wisely.