20 Things Conservatives Believe About the Government
20 Things Conservatives Believe About the Government
Is that a cynical take? Sure, but it’s also generally true. Government may be a necessary evil, but we could do all the “necessary” parts with a fraction of what we spend, and most people greatly underestimate the “evil” part. Does “evil” sound like too strong of a word? You may think so, but what else would you call a bunch of human ticks that prosper by leeching off of their fellow citizens, lie about everything, bribe people to vote for them with other people’s money, and spend all their time scheming to get more and more power over other Americans?
Smart people have long understood that working as a politician or bureaucrat is not admirable work.
If you’re nodding along with this, you’re probably conservative. If you’re not, read on and you’ll get a much better understanding of how conservatives view government.
1) Government doesn't do anything as efficiently, competently, or cheaply as the private sector.
2) Our government already has enough money to solve just about every problem on earth. It just wastes money. This is why giving the government more tax dollars will never fix anything. The government will simply waste that money too and then ask for more.
3) Government doing nothing about a problem is not a bad thing. In fact, most of the time that is EXACTLY what the government should do about a problem.
4) The more things the government becomes involved in, the more avenues it provides for powerful people and corporations to lobby the government to do their bidding. Big government isn’t the fix for the powerful having too much influence in society. It’s the cause of the problem.
5) If we literally didn’t add a single new law for the next decade or two, the country would be far better off. Our problem isn’t a lack of new laws, it’s all the bad laws and good laws we refuse to enforce.
6) As a nation, we have chosen to ignore and deliberately misinterpret the 10th Amendment to the Constitution which reads, “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” If we stuck to that, which we should, the federal government would be a fraction of the size it is today, we wouldn’t be running a budget deficit and our nation would be far, far better off.
7) Most politicians in DC aren’t overly bright to begin with and it would take a super-genius level of intellect to get a truly in-depth understanding of the large numbers of complicated industries and issues they deal with. As a practical matter, this means that most politicians just do whatever they’re told by lobbyists and political allies without having any real understanding of the long-term ramifications of the legislation they’re supporting. This is one of the many reasons government legislation is ultimately more likely to lead to disaster than good outcomes over time.
8) Politicians don't love you, are not your friends, and should be trusted only to the degree that what they're doing can be verified. Very few of them care about you, the country, or anything much other than not getting caught doing anything that will send them to prison and keeping their cushy jobs.
9) Government agencies should be limited in power, frequently audited, often investigated, and unable to do anything of significance that Congress doesn’t explicitly sign off on.
10) The further the government gets from a citizen, the less effectively it knows and serves his interests. In other words, there are exceptions, but as a general rule, small-town government is better attuned to meeting the needs of citizens than city government, which works better than state government, which works better than governance in DC.
11) The government shouldn't bail out failing banks or corporations. Allowing badly run enterprises to fail is ultimately good for the economy because it allows the capital and manpower that has been badly used in those endeavors to be moved to more productive, well-run businesses.
12) Anything that shifts power from the federal government to state governments is generally a good thing.
13) Government employees shouldn’t be allowed to form unions and should be extremely limited in power.
14) The government shouldn't be focused on taking money from one group of Americans to give to another. It should be focused on creating an environment that makes it as easy as possible for people to succeed on their own without the help of the government.
15) Just about anything that reduces the tax burden on the populace, the size of government, and the power of government is good for the country.
16) Anything we solely need “the rich” to fund isn’t worth doing. If the government isn’t willing to tax the middle class to fund a program because it would be too unpopular or expensive, that program shouldn’t exist.
17) The most dangerous, existential threat to our country’s future is not nuclear war, invasion, or global warming, it’s our own government. Perhaps they’ll effectively bankrupt us, become completely tyrannical, or alternately, mismanage things so badly that they cause the country to break up. But the biggest threat to our country is in DC. Incidentally, as government gets bigger, that threat to our country gets bigger at the same time.
18) Every time the government fixes one problem, it almost inevitably creates another often bigger problem in the process. Then, the solution it offers up to the new problem is… more government.
19) Once government grows, it’s nearly impossible to shrink it because of the nature of how it works. Once a group is getting paid or gets some program it considers beneficial, it will fight tooth and nail to keep it in place. Because of the size of the government, the general public is never willing to go to the mat to cut spending on anything that it considers a “small” part of the budget. So, there is always intense pressure to protect government spending, but very seldom any real energy around cutting anything. Therefore, the only logical defense against this is not to grow the government in the first place.
20) The government can only prosper at the expense of productive Americans. That means the bigger the federal government becomes, the poorer and less free the American people will become.
Thanks, John, for enumerating some of these truths. The disregard of the 10th amendment is criminal- it's almost like, well, Scotus said something like "since the Commerce clause deals with goods and services in interstate commerce, the Federal government can overrule any state law by simply by having us conclude that "the effects of your law are not contained just within your one state," so we have authority to overrule them." (How many years until we see the D.C. Democrats codify abortion on demand and use this rationale to uphold it?) To some my highlighting of number 17 will be seen as paranoia, but the founding fathers had just been through a revolution and they knew exactly how important an armed citizenry is to preserving freedom from tyranny. Any wonder why every prominent Democrat in the national spotlight demands gun control?