Supporters of Utopian government (the idolatrous concept that government can bring humanity good that humanity could not otherwise achieve on its own) follow the same play book: seize a universal human activity that most people do well enough, but some people do not. We had this with public education, retirement pensions (social “security”) and now with health care.
Claim that for the sake of those who cannot perform it, government must. Propose a government program that seems, on its face, to be adequate, and propose taxes to pay for it. These taxes will consume all the funds that lower and middle-income families spend on this function, thus making government their only way to get the function accomplished. The wealthy, of course, are given a way out.
But this is a Big Lie and part of the Culture of Lies. Government cannot perform an economic function as well as private business can. Even when it does, it cannot do it for long, or without exempting itself from economic reality.
The Culture of Lies is how well government does. How much, in total, are we spending for public education, compared to how much it would cost if we could send our children to any of the tens of thousands of private schools that we would have? We spend a staggering amount of tax money to educate a single child to the point of graduation from High School, in the extreme case such as Washington DC, it costs almost $1.5 million to graduate a single youth who is competent at their grade level in math.
The Culture of Lies is extended in how well Social Security performs. Happily, we have some legislative mistakes that allowed one county in Texas to set up its own replacement for Social Security. Their retirees enjoy payments that are some three times that of the federal program. Congress won’t make that mistake again. The Texas example, extended nationwide, documents how many trillions of dollars are just destroyed by how the system is designed.
There is no way that socialized medical care will cost less or deliver better service that the mess we presently have. If it does, it will be for very selected and accidental backwaters or eddies in the main current of wealth destruction, not to mention destruction of choice and liberty.
A Culture of Lies By Fjordman
http://www.brusselsjournal.com/node/2267/print
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A Culture of Lies
By Fjordman
Created 2007-07-26 19:09
The always excellent writer Theodore Dalrymple, one of the most astute observers of Britain and indeed of the Western world today, has assessed the ten years under the leadership of former PM Tony Blair. According to Dalrymple, “Many in Britain believe that he has been the worst prime minister in recent British history, morally and possibly financially corrupt, shallow and egotistical.” One of the reasons for this negative view is the rapid growth of insecurity, ironically combined with the even more rapid growth of surveillance: “The typical Briton finds himself recorded by security cameras 300 times a day does not secure him in the slightest from crime or antisocial behavior, which remain prevalent in Britain, so no one feels any safer from the terrorist threat despite the ever-increasing government surveillance.”
British citizens pay obscenely large amounts of taxes, but get less and less in return for this, except an increasingly hostile state: “The National Health Service, where bureaucracies have hugely expanded and entwined their interests so closely with those of private suppliers and consultancies that it is difficult to distinguish public from private any longer. Spending on the NHS has increased by two and a half times in the space of 10 years; yet it is hard to see any corresponding improvement in the service, other than in the standard of living of those who work in it.”
He believes the inadequacies of the state are hidden beneath a web of lies of half-truths, and by confusing the public through corrupting official statistics. Unemployment rates are artificially kept down by classifying people as sick rather than unemployed, “and thus, by a single lie, is the population, the medical profession and the government corrupted.” Likewise, crime rates are kept down by encouraging the police not to record crimes. Through such measures, “the whole of society finds itself corrupted and infantilized by its inability to talk straight.”
Dalrymple states that “We have come to expect dishonesty – of which this little lie was an example – at every level of society. The dishonesty is intellectual, moral and financial, and its root is self-interest conceived in the narrowest possible way. In modern Britain, probity is foolishness or, worse still, naivety.” He believes this corrupts the entire fabric of society: “When dignity requires illegality, there is something rotten in the state.”
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