Ideas #8

Political Tomfoolery

Today is super Tuesday. The day that the people of the United States get all riled up about. The day we select our political leaders.

For many reasons, this day doesn’t really have me as riled up as so many of my fellow Americans. I am not facebooking about “feeling the bern” or snapchatting the lines at the caucus. Instead I am thinking about what it really means to get people riled up. To have a massive amount of people utterly hypnotized.

Well, to start, I must emphasize that I am in no way opposed to helping people and promoting the well being of every human being on this planet.

Where a lot of my qualms with the political system start is this idea of “helping people”. In a sense this is what a government is for; to help the common man and keep the people safe and happy.

There are a lot of directions I can go with this but today I want to focus on the idea that the government knows what is best for us. They decide what needs to be done and what rules need to be put in place. Increasingly the government of the United States has been placing more and more restrictions, regulations and taxes on the people, slowly controlling more and more of our daily lives. The current state of the government is just pure power. And the people in charge? Powerful. Yes, obviously. So are they really focused on the happiness and well-being of the common man or are they focused on their own interests and the interests of their powerful friends. This can be debated, but I think it is a pretty obvious conclusion.

The government is controlling more and more, consolidating power and forcing us as private citizens to rely on it increasingly during our daily lives. I look at other examples of governments who encourage and ultimately force the people to rely on them. Countries like China and North Korea come to mind. These are unilateral systems where creative and free thinking ideas are not welcome. Where the government is right all the time. No matter what.

I do not want to live in a world where the government tells me what to do. And we are accelerating towards that reality. So, if I can leave with one point it would be that we need to shrink the government, not to grow it.