“Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”
– Hanlon’s Razor
If government had a working axiom, it would be this: To pursue and defend mediocrity wherever it is found and to institute it where it is absent.
The larger a government, the more idiotic and destructive its behavior appears to both the casual and educated observer. Historical hindsight provides legions of examples of government not only doing stupid things daily and reinforcing failure but creating advance extinction events that spell their doom as they happily march to their own funeral.
One can suppose that a confirmation bias exist in its functionaries and bureaucrats that make them immune to common sense and inevitability. A large percentage of government officials and a little less so their apparatchiks peppering the thousands of agencies in the US seem oblivious to the sheer lack of efficacy and effectiveness in accomplishing anything they set out to do. A small percentage of those, larger among elected officials, are psychopaths and sociopaths whose very life trajectories demand the subordination of others through threats or actual violence; government legitimizes criminal violence in the minds of the actors and the half-witted supporters of government supremacism. The state is the world’s leading provider of rationales for using immoral means to achieve moral ends and every sober observer can see how that has ended. Whether the slow and sclerotic death of vital commerce systems like the Keystone Keynesian recipe for national economic seppuku so popular with the mandarins in DC or the naked economic illiteracy of the Keynesian cousin in Marxism, the results are the same. The formation of vast prison states where every human transaction is vertically and horizontally regulated through taxation, regulation and police violence.
Historically, the only liberation that occurred has been the death knells of these systems as they were riven by war, collapsed of their own contradictions, like the USSR or simply crushed every incentive through moronic regulation, excessive taxation and iatrogenic effect like the US and the EU.
The freed market has a severe disciplinary function that culls bad business and removes poor entrepreneurs; the price signals dictate who continues to purchase goods and service now and into the future. Bad business simply ceases to attract consumers who vote through purchase and the ineffective firm dries up and blows away to make way for a more effective competitor.
Governments don’t do that nor do they have the incentives to do. The state works on perverse incentives that collectivizes risks and privatizes reward to politically connected mechanisms. This is one of the reasons the franchise at the atomistic level makes zero rational sense in any meaningful way and why focused and targeted lobbying of elected interests and their tentacled regulatory agencies are hypersensitive to political fortunes and trade winds. In other words, the single vote cast by a human in an election in America has an extraordinarily low percentage of effectiveness while the focused purchasing of political influence through lobbying has tremendous benefits. One need only look at the money spent to win the crime family position in the White House to see the results. Obama and Romney each spent approximately one billion a piece to seize control of a potential budget exceeding 3.8 trillion dollars in acknowledged spending. One can see the cold logic in spending that amount of money to gain control over the Federal purse strings and the huge violence apparatus it wields over the tax cattle known as citizens.
I employ the term acknowledged because the government clearly cooks the books as evidenced by scandal after scandal and the sheer ineptitude and incompetency of the DoD accounting infrastructure as an example.
Remember, it is the mandarins and supernova intellectuals from across the political spectrum that have created a country in the US that has an annual acknowledged budget nearing four trillion a year, an acknowledged debt of nearly 17 trillion which is approximately one hundred and ten percent of GDP in the above-ground economy and total unfunded debt obligations in to the future between 127 trillion and 205 trillion. This is the same country that invaded Afghanistan whose GDP is about ten billion per annum less the foreign subsidies it gets. The US has spent 500 billion in the conflict so far or about ten times the independent GDP of Afghanistan. These figures are most likely low because they do not amortize effects on forces around the world impacted by the spending and the necessary deterioration of war-stocks paid for over decades.
I mentioned the DoD idiocy that is a most impressive species of accounting illiteracy.
“This is just the tip of the iceberg. DoD doesn’t have validated financial statements. Four years ago, Congress ordered the Pentagon to get its act together and make itself auditable. Of course, it gave the Pentagon seven years to do so. A number of DoD component organizations are already warning that they don’t believe they will be ready for 2017. “
And this is a mere 25% of the total acknowledged budget of the geniuses on the Potomac. Don’t be fooled by the accounting shenanigans in the Congress because the DoE and overseas contingency funding bleeds into the total DoD commitment. The US consumes 41% of the global budget for war in all the countries on Earth. It is amusing to even consider how much of the DoD spending is legitimately defensive in the most magnanimous terms.
One can look at the shabby and silly exploits of NASA which has become space exploration only in the sense of finding hilariously nonsensical programs to fiscal disasters of lunatic proportions to spending money in ways that would even embarrass harden Marxists. Of course, private space companies can now accommodate a launch for ten percent of the cost of a NASA rocket launch but most people who pay attention to how government works should simply assume that is the case.
These are not exceptions, this is how government works because it is based on a society formed through violence, fed on spoils and incentivized by a fantastical variety of economic nostrums that have more to do with Alice in Wonderland and Santa Claus than sound monetary and fiscal practices. Macroeconomics is nothing more than the sophisticated rationalization of government interference in the economic affairs of individuals and a Marxoid notion completely devoid of financial literacy. Paul Krugman and other collectivist shaman are the high priests of endorsing and defending a morally indefensible system based on threats or initiation of force against individuals in order to rob them at gunpoint of their time, resources and wealth.
Government is a thief when all the patriotic bunting, bad music and fancy intellectualizing is stripped to the core processes. Most rational and moral human beings would no more assault a woman for breaking a seatbelt law or murder a family pet for the cheap thrill of being a badged thug who could get away with it. Normal and thriving humans not possessed of psychopathy would most likely not organize a society on violence but that is the very reason government can exist in the first place.
But in the state, you have the worst of several worlds: you have a society built on violence where the worst people are put in charge to protect people from bad actors and they not only makes things far worse but have no track record whatsoever that they can do anything right. They saddle unborn generations with debt under a system that has no braking mechanism for bad decisions and simply continues to move forward until it destroys itself.
There is a certain beastly logic to the state, once it has its claws in something, it rarely relents. It nearly never surrenders power nor absolves control of something it has captured but it does it in a fashion that not only puts its own economic efficacy in the hazard but guarantees a shortened existence as it destroys the very thing that provides it sustenance. That is the way of the state.
By allowing government to dominate the world, humanity will always be worse off and existentially challenged in every area of advancing peacefully and prospering.
“If human beings are fundamentally good, no government is necessary; if they are fundamentally bad, any government, being composed of human beings, would be bad also.”
– Fred Woodworth
Brilliant.
I wouldn’t be so sure on the space thing. While I do believe it is possible for a private company to do it, look at how much money was given to old elon’s various company’s. Something like 2billion bucks. Ohh yea and he was critical in helping Obama get elected. He let him use his jet for free in 2008. We as taxpayers are footing the bill for his dream of going to mars. Not sure were the profit is there?
I am very sure on private space for one solid reason: there is a tremendous return over time for economies of scale and the sheer experience gained over time in exceeding sub-orbital limitations.
The potential for the lottery winnings of one asteroid successfully parked at L5 or landed on the moon for exploitation is enormous. The government simply cannot get out of its own way.
I have been following the private space efforts since Newt starting being a booster in the 1980s, through Conestoga, Rotary, etc.
The dinosaur space companies were content to BUY friggin’ Russian rocket engines for their birds, while Musk designed a brand new engine from scratch.
SpaceX is the genuine article. No question Musk is a wheeler/dealer and he is currying favor with who is in power now. Look at the opinion of space-cognizant genuine conservatives and/or libertarians like Bill Whittle (Free Frontier) on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2h_d6YVA1Kg), or Rand Simberg or Jerry Pournelle to understand SpaceX.
Ahaha, ‘collectivist shaman.’