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The Paradise Perspective: Commentary from a Free and Compassionate Alternate Reality Volume 1, Number 28 The Bridges of Hennepin (and Every Other) County by Glen Allport Exclusive to STR August 6, 2007 Last
week, a
bridge on Interstate 35W in It
isn't only bridges that are
deteriorating: roads generally, the electrical grid, oil pipelines, sewer
and water lines, levees, and other basic infrastructure in the United
States has been largely neglected for many years. You've seen the stories.
Less than a month ago (July 19, 2007), an underground
steam pipe exploded beneath a Manhattan street, killing at least one
person and creating what looked like a war zone near Grand Central
Terminal. -
- - - - An
obvious question – although not a question many seem to be asking – is
"What the heck have Those In Charge been doing
with our money, anyway?" In
particular, what have "they" done with the money that clearly should have gone into infrastructure maintenance, repair, and
replacement? It's
not as if the various governments involved (local, county, state, and
national) don't have oceans of
our money to work with; they do. Total government spending was about 12%
of the economy in 1930, and is now 44% – in addition to regulatory
and compliance costs forced upon the private sector. Even 12% was a far
larger portion of the economy than government had traditionally taken in Lack
of tax money isn't the problem, in other words. What the tax money is
being spent on is the problem. You
tax money is being spent on pork,
on corruption,
on slush funds,
and on entitlements;
on far better pay, pensions, and other benefits for
government workers than for ordinary citizens (including at the local
level); on huge increases in the numbers
of government employees (especially at the state and local levels); on
war (close to half
the federal budget goes to past, present, and future war, by some
accounts and depending on how one categorizes the spending), on ramping
up the police state, on sports
stadiums, on the war
on drugs, and on almost anything else politicians feel like spending
it on. Plenty
of this money is wasted, lost, or spent in secret. The day before the
terror attacks of 9/11/2001, Donald Rumsfeld said the Pentagon could not
track how 25% of its entire budget is spent; at the time, he said the
Defense Department was missing
$2.3 trillion dollars (link is to a CBS "Eye on America"
report by Vince Gonzalez, including interviews with whistleblowers,
retired military officials, and others; highly recommended). As a
reminder: a trillion is a
thousand billion, and a billion is a thousand million. I cannot
believe that much money was simply lost; even if $100 billion was outright
lost and another $100 billion stolen, that leaves $2.1 trillion to account
for – plus whatever is
unaccounted for since 2001. One can be certain those trillions were spent
on something, by somebody – officially accounted for or not. This is
an incredibly chilling story: our
military-industrial complex is spending trillions of our tax dollars that
it apparently refuses to even account for. What are they doing with
all that money? How odd that this isn't an ongoing, major story with at
least the level of coverage given to celebrity DUI arrests. With
trillions of dollars "missing" and trillions more spent on
aggressive war and on a laundry list of other pork, evil, and simple
foolishness, no wonder there never seems to be enough money to take care
of basics. The taxpayers are certainly handing over enough tax dollars,
but politicians and bureaucrats are spending it like degenerate gamblers
in the throes of a high-stakes binge. The
next time you cross one of those 75,000 bridges, give a moment's thought
to the way your tax money is being spent. Meditate on the built-in
incentives (here's
one example of how they work) that lead government to spend your money
in counterproductive, inefficient, and often violent or unhealthy ways,
and which eventually deprive "basic government services" of the
funds they need. The
fix is not to make government more efficient; that is a pipe dream,
because the nature of coercive government is to become ever-more corrupt
and inefficient, no matter how many times the government is reformed. The
fix is to use less coercive government in the first place – ideally, to
do things without the coercion
of government, as civilized
humans do when dealing with each other. Government
is truly The
Worst Way to Do Anything, as I have pointed out before. That is not a
new idea; Thoreau said it eloquently in Civil
Disobedience (even the relatively tiny government of his mid-1800s Coercion
is the enemy of love and freedom, and using coercion as the cornerstone of
society – as we increasingly do in the Falling bridges are only one symptom of the real problem, which is the dramatic growth of government size and coercion in this country, and thus the equally dramatic loss of efficient and civilized private society. As the darkness of tyranny descends further, where will desperate Americans flee to? Glen Allport is the author of The Paradise Paradigm: On Creating A World of Compassion, Freedom, and Prosperity and maintains paradise-paradigm.net. This is one in a series of columns on the human condition.
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