Good government is sort of like unicorns and fairies. We all know what it's supposed to look like, we just have never seen any.
That said, though government is something that can go wrong very easily, due to the normal pressures of the human makeup (and even their rouge) there are degrees on how bad a government can get.
Arguably, the founders tried to create good government by surrounding it with internal pressures designed to keep it small. What they counted without was semantic wizards capable of turning "interstate commerce" into laws over everything including what type of food you can grow and how much and what kind of cars you can drive. They certainly didn't count on the power to tax meaning that you'd have to submit your possible treatment to a panel of bureaucrats. Or perhaps they knew it, and they thought if they could establish a government that worked for just a little while...
Most government is mildly bad -- would that it were indifferent, but that would require the people who get into administration jobs to be sort of like me and believe that telling people what to do is too much work and they'll figure it out, anyway. Most people who do that are, in fact, the type of person who thrives on power and telling you what to do. This is why in our modern fables, greed is the worst sin, but love of power isn't even mentioned, even though most of the time wealth is just a means to power.
What this means is that most governments tend to wish to acquire (and mostly succeed) the most power possible over the most people possible.
Posted by: Redneck Jim ||
07/10/2013 13:23 Comments ||
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#2
So, what is good government? Ive never seen it in my life, since, since long before the sixties (1947 when I was born) government has seized on charity as a good way to get more power to itself for the children and for the poor and thereby has been destroying civic virtue and that which allows civilization to exist.
Posted by: Redneck Jim ||
07/10/2013 13:39 Comments ||
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A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
