If you are looking for a perfect example of a society that makes its own problems look no further. You are living in one. Being blessed with abundant natural resources, an innovative population, and a tradition of freedom you could expect our success in the basics of life. We have a booming agriculture that feeds other parts of the world as well as ourselves. We have a defense so strong that no other country dare threaten us, and a historical gift of basic principles of governing from our founders. Yet somehow, here in the early 21st century we find ourselves in a shameful and innocent mess of national governance. It has robbed our citizens of their national pride and disgraced the American dream. This situation was not brought on by nature or military invasion, but by the efforts of our elected leadership.
So what happened? If you take a broad view, and don’t get bogged down by all the hot air, it is a pretty clear picture.
The national debt was not caused by the American working population unable to directly supply the services and materials from their own work. The farmers continue to plant crops and the factory workers continue to work and generate real wealth wherever allowed. Over the last 25 years, however, the elite ruling class and their bean counters have focused on moving large amounts of that wealth to themselves through worthless financial ploys. They have now greatly overplayed their hand and killed the golden goose by selling much of the nations real wealth creation capabilities overseas.
So the producing members of the economy, who are the only force that can create new wealth along with the basics of living, are now faced with not only fixing the productivity machine but also with addressing the debt that was carelessly accumulated while they were stealing from us.
What have we got to work with? First we have to understand that the “government” is really two organizations. There is the political half which consists of elected leadership plus the special interests that finance them. Their only qualifications are the ability to sell the voting public that they should be elected. Then there is the operational half which carries out the policies and legislative actions set by the political half. This is made up of workers who are a typical cross section of Americans. Their positions have technical qualifications which must be met by the employee. These people are faced with implementing the changing and inconsistent requirements of the elected and their appointees who are election winners of our two party election process.
It is easy to pinpoint which group is to blame for our sorry state. The elected representatives have severely failed in their obligations to the citizens. Their corruption and incompetence have created the serious problems that we now face. Although the operational workers do sometimes make mistakes they do not have the embedded corruption of the elected elite. It is the elected elite that must be decisively improved. People who rail against “the government” without understanding this distinction are misguided.
The only tools we have for correction are the election process, our numbers, and our thoughtfulness. As we have posted many times we must somehow reintroduce ethics, truth and intelligence into our elections. These traits are not common in either party. It will require much closer attention to the quality of political candidates. The citizen voter must make the difficult effort to sort ethical behavior from dishonesty, truth from lies, and intelligence from stupidity. There is no single ideology to substitute for these basics.
No comments:
Post a Comment