Please, Sir, I Want Some More

Dicken’s Oliver Twist is an orphaned child suffering the hunger of the poorest of the poor. For all its legitimacy his plea wasn’t taken too kindly, nor his bowl refilled. 

We are all holding out our hands for more too, far more – from our governments, even though, protests aside, we aren’t in the predicament of poor Oliver. His was do or die, ours, preferences and entitlement. Oliver was rebuffed, we are pandered to, even if all we get is a bowl of political gruel.

We are pandered to by ballot-box-bait. Promises are made by aspirant and incumbent politicians. Promise is their lingua franca. Some promises are fulfilled, many simply can’t be, and some lack a majority backing. Yet we vote based on what am I going to get out of it; we are wooed by promises even when we know that promises are made only to be broken. 

And then we show impatience and intolerance that our saviours are mere mortals. Next election we vote them out as failures and frauds because they didn’t deliver. Enter, more promises, promises we vote for, needs we demand are fulfilled. 

I wonder if the problem, and it is a problem, is less with the humanity and corruptibility of elected officials, than with the insatiable clamour of the populace who, recognising it or not, cede more and more power to governments by asking for more and more, meanwhile lessening reliance on community initiative, personal frugality (paying for what you can afford) and forethought (saving/investing). We are looking to the halls of power to solve every imaginable problem, to make money available to every special interest group, yes, to coddle us cradle to grave. Rarely is it not about money, even if the money is for an allegedly good cause. 

The more power we cede to government by our demands the more dependent on government we become. The more power we relinquish to the government the more government borrows. The more they borrow the worse our future, or that of our grandchildren. The debt of the US government (which is to say, the taxpayer – you and I) is beyond imagination – figures so vast, we don’t even know what they mean, and what we don’t know can’t hurt us - right? 

Does the public realise or even care that the more money governments borrow the more likely we are to become the slaves of powers that could be inimical to us? Who is going to pay the debt?  We can’t keep borrowing and think someone else is going to foot the bill. We will, our children will, and most certainly our grandchildren will. More and more of our tax dollars are funding debt when it should be used for health, education, defence, and essential services (roads, water supply, etc). It is these that are being squeezed, especially when we add minority group funding/demands, massive defence/offence spending, and things such as space programs (so we can take our contagion to the stars), etc.  

We are doing ourselves, individuals, and communities, a terrible disservice and we are demanding something from governments that money can’t buy. But if we keep demanding keep expecting taxes to increase – taxes for any and everything. 

What is all this doing, aside from lessening our creativity and ingenuity in finding community solutions, going without for a season, and planning? It is giving away something that is better retained, it is relying on governments to give us money and meaning, it is robbing us of what is vital to our well-being – self-determination, self, and community reliance - an unpropped-up existence.

Instead, and in short, the government has become our saviour; this is the hope of Marxism and the reality of most democracies.