I read Bob Herbert’s Op-Ed “Invitation to Disaster” on the New York Times website yesterday.  I had problems when reading it; I found that I couldn’t get as excited about the topic as Mr. Herbert.  I mainly feel a sense, not of desperation and an urge to fight back as he does, but one of resignation to the futility of fighting the problem.  The People can vote themselves money, and are engaged in said activity with a vengeance.

Mr. Herbert begins his piece with the following introduction:

We didn’t pay attention to the housing bubble. We closed our eyes to warnings that the levees in New Orleans were inadequate. We gave short shrift to reports that bin Laden was determined to attack the U.S. And now we’re all but ignoring the fiscal train wreck that is coming from states with budget crises big enough to boggle the mind.

The states are in the worst fiscal shape since the Depression. The Great Recession has caused state tax revenues to fall off a cliff. Some states – New York and California come quickly to mind – are facing prolonged budget nightmares. Across the country, critical state services are being chopped like firewood. More cuts are coming. Taxes and fees are being raised. Yet the budgets in dozens and dozens of states remain drastically out of balance.

 The author shows one of two things in his second paragraph, either of which sets the tone for me for the rest of the article:

1) an unrealistic view of the world,

or

2) an extreme liberal bias (which is not an unrealistic view of the world, but in my opinion, the wrong aim for overall human existence)

when he says “Across the country, critical state services are being chopped like firewood.”

Now, this is obviously not true.  This simple fact reduces the rest of his piece to so much irrelevance, his spin of gloom and doom to so much fear mongering.

If the states were “chopping critical state services”, they would cease to exist. That’s what “critical” means: Urgently necessary. Required for survival. In a state of emergency without it.

We must keep in mind that government is reactionary. Government is a product of our own creation, we are the product of nature’s creation, and like every other natural world construct, government is based on a “stimulus/response” pattern of action and existence. To easily demonstrate this, you must realize that the government shouldn’t arrest people for crimes they haven’t committed yet, nor does it develop law without an existing crime or problem to fix. Good law isn’t arbitrary. 

Thus, seeing as all agenda items are pushed in response to some “crisis” or an “emergency”, that all law is developed to address an existing problem or grievance, it’s about as safe as a tank to say that we’d have a state of “someone’s emergency” when we cut a program, but it’s not an emergency for the existence of the state.

If we suddenly stopped spending billions on some snow owl that’s too stupid to find a new home when loggers cut down his tree, or on dropping bombs on people in the Middle East with so little education that they couldn’t find “America” on a map, we would find that we’d have more money in the State coffers and our State could go on as merry as you please. We could do one of two things, spend more on social programs (liberals) or reduce taxes (conservative).  The possibilities are not endless, but they certainly outnumber the option the states are currently facing: fiscal insolvency bringing about the end of the State’s ability to protect citizens and enforce contracts, it’s primary responsibilities.  This would have the effect of making government completely useless.

From a conservative/Constitutional moderate viewpoint, the situation boils down into this:

The government exists to do only two things: 1) Protect us from foreign aggression, and 2) to enforce business contracts inside its borders. The government can cut everything except the expenditures required to provide for the defense of the state (not our “foreign interests”), and the government lawyers required to break up trusts and run its courts and prisons, but still not cut a single, “critical”, state service.

Conservatives fight the two old truths “People are stupid.” and “A fool and his money are soon parted.”

Someone, somewhere, is always itching to ease the burden of carrying around a hefty chunk of change in their pockets for the American taxpayers, and the People, being ignorant and blissfully unaware, tend to fall for their scams more often than not. Heck, the successful scam artists, the really talented ones, make good careers for themselves in Congress. But should the People wake up to the scam, they will realize they’re being fleeced and that a wonderful existence with an extra helping of freedom can be had for much, much less money than what is currently being taken from their paychecks.

Indeed, what Mr. Herbert’s piece illustrates really well is the anger that the People are going to feel when the money finally runs out, when the things they’ve been promised are no longer possible for the government to achieve.  People that pay their whole lives into Medicare, Medicaid, and SSI, just to watch the programs go belly up, are going to be furious.  These are not critical services, as he would like you to believe, and the state will not cease to exist without them, but the People do feel entitled to them, and will rage when their turn to collect in the giant government Ponzi scheme vanishes due to poor fiscal policy and misguided, almost ridiculous, belief on the part of the voters in politicians and their word.

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