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Expansive Government Risks Expansive Incompetence
Over the weekend, the Biden Administration Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm proposed the utterly idiotic idea that lower- and middle-income families who are having trouble paying for groceries, utilities, and gasoline should saddle themselves with thousands of dollars of debt to possibly be able to claim a tax credit in the future.
Reacting to this latest idiotic idea from the Biden Administration, I started to think about the many examples of basic incompetence that populate the highest levels of the Biden Administration. I review these examples of basic incompetence not so much because I’m a masochist, but because we have relatives, friends, and acquaintances who advocate for an expansive government to run many areas of people’s lives. We should remind them how easy it is for an expansive government to become populated with idiots and incompetents. Even someone who agrees with stated Biden Administration objectives must be starting to see how much incompetence is present at the highest level of that administration. And I think it is valuable to remind them when they want to concentrate power in the government that power may be exercised by incompetents.
The President himself: There seems to be an effective program in the White House to keep him out of public view. When he does appear, he is often obviously confused about where he is and why he is there. Does he or does he not have the basic faculties the job requires?
The Vice President: She has accomplished none of the tasks that have been publicly assigned to her. Nor has she made even token progress on any of them. Most conspicuously on the issues at the southern border of our country. Chaos follows her, including in such basic tasks as internal office administration. Her public talks are mostly jumbles of meaningless words assembled into incomprehensible collections that sometimes have the structure of a sentence.
Justice: The head of the Department of Justice (Garland) is either indifferent or hostile to the concerns of millions of Americans that politics seems to influence the dispensing of justice, and that the application of justice seems to depend on your political party affiliation and/or your positions on certain political or policy topics. Although the federal Department of Justice is not responsible for the idiocy of local district attorneys, the federal department doesn’t seem bothered by such local idiocy either.
Homeland Security: The head of Homeland Security (Mayorkas) keeps talking nonsense. He insists the nation’s border is secure as his department is literally creating openings in the border to facilitate the importation of drugs, criminals, and slaves. He refuses to acknowledge the issues faced by municipalities along the nation’s border as thousands of people flood across that border every week. He speaks against and punishes border patrol agents trying to do what they think of as their jobs.
Defense (military): Very publicly claims to be more concerned about the minute feelings of a small number of “woke” people who may or may not be in the military than about military readiness and the defense of the country and its interests. Very public and conspicuously incompetent withdrawal from Afghanistan.
Transportation: The head of the Transportation Department (Buttigieg) decided to take off for several months during the biggest disruption to the distribution of goods the country had seen in decades (and maybe ever), many of those disruptions transportation-based. He only last week acknowledged that there were problems in the air transport system that the rest of us have known about for months. And all he could muster was to point a finger of blame at others. No ideas or suggestions. No acknowledgment of the possibility that government entities in his purview might be connected to those problems. He publicly expresses contempt for families struggling to pay for gasoline, recommending they instead spend tens of thousands of dollars on new electric cars. But then in his prior job as Mayor of South Bend, Indiana, he couldn’t get potholes in town roads fixed.
Energy: Besides advocating for people to increase individual debt as a strategy for coping with inflation, the department often seems to adopt a very narrow view of what constitutes “energy,” and to advocate against (or at least not advocate for) reasonable, practical energy sources like domestic oil and natural gas and nuclear power.
Health and Human Services: The head of “Health” (Becerra) seems to spend more energy advocating death (killing babies in abortion as a social good) and the mutilation of the children who survive gestation with “gender-affirming care” than he does promoting health and wellness across the population.
Education: The federal department of education supports tacitly, if not explicitly, the efforts of teachers’ unions to prevent children from attending school and getting an education, and to abuse many of the children who actually do make it into a classroom.
Let’s remind our relatives, friends, and acquaintances that a risk of an expansive, active government is that it will become populated with incompetents rather than experts. When we deal with private enterprises run by incompetents we almost always can find ways to avoid those incompetent enterprises. But we don’t have a choice in government. When incompetents run the governments that rule us, we have to deal with those incompetents. The more expansive government is, and the more it rules us, the greater the risk that we will find ourselves under the rule of incompetents.
Published in Politics
Government does everything at gunpoint. If you doubt this, try not paying your taxes. End of story. There is nothing good about not keeping it as small as possible.
The problem is, they get all of their news from NPR. It’s really hard to deal with this unless you are talking to them in person.
The mask mandates in Minnesota were pretty interesting in this sense. They could make a bunch of laws just by cabinet decree. It might even just have been the governor. Well, the governor made a great big public deal about how he was going to use a “light hand” about mask mandates. If you actually looked it up, the decree was backed by jail time and $25,000 fines of non-owning middle-management. I would explain that the masks were forced at gunpoint, because they obviously are. Non-owning middle-management is going to call the police if you don’t cooperate because they don’t want to go to jail. Democrats didn’t like my walking them through the logic.
Then of course, masks didn’t do a damn thing at the aggregate level.
Severe example, but that is the way things actually work.
there is at least some hope-
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/new-conservative-group-gets-1-6-billion-donation
the left-ie CNN & Vox will be screaming Dark Money!!!
How do you like my policies now?
No problem, just buy solar panels and an electric car!
We had a local never Trump that just went on and on about her.
Did your friend exhibit symptoms of Ostalgie?
The chief motives for expanding government are money, power, and an ideological agenda. All are certain to fill slots with incompetents and fake experts.
jesus
Check out Cold War conversations if you’ve never heard it before.
My utility bill in June 2022 reflected an established cost of a 34 cent per kilowatt rate structure.
Other places in the USA are at 11 cents to 17 cents.
We are the state that Biden has promoted as being his template for what he hopes the rest of the USA “achieves. ” (BTW, we have an “energy efficient” stove, “energy efficient” washing machine etc – but prior to purchasing those, we were at 17 cents per kilowatt!)
If your electric bill follows the path of natural gas (which is what runs many power plants) from the chart above, you need to be paying at least 68 cents to “catch up.”
This is my view —->
Government Is How We Steal From Each Other™
Government Is How We Steal From
Each OtherYou™FIFY
The fact is, tactically almost everybody can get involved. You just need to work at it. It’s also very stupid to not think like that. Sometimes you don’t need to work at it, when the average Medicare recipient takes out $300,000 more than they paid in.
Having said that, the Ruling Class does better than the average person.
#EndTheFed
Here is something for fellow Ricochet members to consider: How many of you rushed out to get the COVID mRNA “vaccines” for free, and were initially relieved that the Fed budget was set up to commit taxpayers to be spending some 10 to 40 trillions of dollars to “combat COVID.”??
Would people here have signed up for Jab One, Jab Two, Jab 3 and booster if each of you had to pay some $ 459 a pop for each shot?
Do any people here have any idea at all what insurance premiums, including monthly MediCare and MediCare premium Supplemental payments are going to sky rocket off to being, now that all the many cases of Antibody Dependent Enhancement (that is, a COVId or influenza virus that infects the individual and slams their body with double or triple the jolt due to how the COV and yearly flu jabs set a person up to allow this to occur) are proliferating?
One out of 1300 young males will most likely experience myocarditris – an ailment which could require lifelong routine of medications? Again, what will be the effect on insurance premiums?
And many many other ailments have proliferated at exorbitant rates. These ailments will also affect costs.
Then consider life insurance premiums: two major life insurance firms have noticed record increases in numbers of fatalities for adult males ages 18 to 45. Will life insurance premiums skyrocket as well?
Just thinking about people I know and have known personally, and it then seems that most who vote for Democrats are employed by large institutions or else county, city, state or Fed agencies.
The Republicans I know are usually business people. They understand that regulations are often more about a need for some agency to expand its power over large segments of society and then demand larger budgets and more employees than about any real needs of our society’s members.
So you have the non-business-minded voting for the non-business minded. Yet another reason why it is so hard to drain The swamp.
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Is there really massive incompetence?
The question can be answered “Yes!” from an individual citizen’s perspective.
Or it can be answered with a resounding “No – our needs have never been served better” if you are the executive of a major pharmaceutical company.
The theory the government is incompetent is true only when we consider the actual needs of society and compare it to how many of our needs are not met, versus how many of the needs of large corporations are indeed met quite nicely by “public servants.”
Eisenhower warned the public of the “military/industrial state,” which has now morphed into the “military/industrial/surveillance state.” During the Spring of 2020, Bill Gates advised the public that we would all be demanding an ability to “know the health status of our neighbor” back when he was on CBS and BBC interviews telling the world how far the COVID experiment would propel entire nations into even more surveillance.
This new state doesn’t meet anyone’s need except for the honor and glory of politicians and “major influencers” like Gates as they promote the Military/Industrial/Surveillance state.
Two and a half years of COVID being wrongly handled by “incompetent” Tony Fauci, and it now is easy to see that from the point of view of each and every individual citizen, Fauci failed us.
But from the Corporate Viewpoint of Big Pharma, which had put decades into its goal of totally capturing our “health agencies” so those agencies would serve their interests, and it is easy to realize that corporate executives view Fauci not as being incompetent but as a hero.
He might well be a hero that Big Pharma is willing to throw onto history’s dung heap. The willingness will double if ditching Fauci means the Seedy Cee, FDA and NIH remain intact. After all, there can still be arranged affairs for their hero, like the recent one million dollar tax-free award that Fauci received from Israel, for his speaking “truth to power:” wherein Fauci was the Truth, and Trump was the Evil Hitlerian Power.
F
Some good podcasts.
I’ve known a lot of liberals who were amazingly sympathetic towards hard-core communists but implacably hostile to conservatives and anti-communists.
Scratch a liberal and a facist bleeds.