America Is Not a Giant Daycare Center
The result of government trying to "fix" things, is a cascade of unintended consequences.
Milton Friedman said:
“Our minds tell us, and history confirms, that the great threat to freedom is the concentration of power. Government is necessary to preserve our freedom, it is an instrument through which we can exercise our freedom; yet by concentrating power in political hands, it is also a threat to freedom. Even though the men who wield this power initially be of good will and even though they be not corrupted by the power they exercise, the power will both attract and form men of a different stamp.”
The idea that government is or can "fix" everything from the cost of child care to the global supply chain is a ludicrous and quite frankly, a dangerous fiction. The cause of these problems was government intervention that distorted the markets in the first place. Outside intervention in the free flow of commerce in a free market (well, mostly free) always creates a cascade of unintended consequences. The more intervention, the more consequences.
America isn't a country to these folks, it is a giant daycare facility and their job is to make sure we get snacks and a nap at 10 and 2.
The greatest "reset" government could do is to get out of the business of being a national busybody, a federal Karen of catastrophic dimensions - but I'm not sure they can.
They certainly have no will to do so. Our economy rests on a foundation of fiction, denial and political motives. The thought that thirteen years of quantitative easing, rampant deficits, burgeoning public debt, pandemic largess, Modern Monetary Theory and a political class making decisions based on election cycles rather than prudent financial management, will just pass quietly into the night is pure insanity.
It is a giant Ponzi scheme, a massive con game. The entire system is set up to collapse, but like a drug addict, our political leadership will do anything to get the next hit and avoid withdrawal.
For several years now, I have suggested that, since the people have had so much control stripped from them in the name of safety and security, about the only way to get the attention of government is to just to withhold your productivity, to "go Galt" as it were. I believe that is finally happening.
The airlines appear to be the first example of what happens when people are put into a situation where the cost of rebellion is zero. Hey, they were going to get fired for not getting medicine they did not want and the many who have already had Covid does not need. Since that productivity was going to be erased by government edict, the threat of termination was no longer a threat.
I think it is likely to spread, and spread rapidly. The government has set this up by paying people not to work and causing people to leave the workforce. Wow, an unintended consequence as a result of government intervention - who knew?
Government cannot insulate people from the negative consequences of its actions forever. There simply isn't enough money to pay everybody into infinity. Remember what Herb Stein said: "If something cannot go on forever, it will stop "- and this will stop.
The greatest challenge in governance of a free republic is, at the same instance, the greatest feature of the American experiment in freedom and also the greatest danger. That challenge can be explained in these two propositions:
Doing something when nothing would yield a better result.
Doing nothing when action is required to achieve a result.
Knowing which one of these is to avoid would seem to rest on simple logic and adherence to the basic core principles of our Constitution, yet almost without qualification and with unerring accuracy, our elite political class relies on focus groups and current public opinion, flips a coin and chooses wrongly in almost every case.
We have been through decades of the former, and Biden's collectivist Build Back Better catastrophe is more of the same on steroids - now is the time to try doing nothing and let the market correct itself.
In 2009, Janet Napolitano, Obama's Homeland Security Secretary reclassified terrorist acts as "man-caused disasters". If there ever was a "man-caused disaster", the Biden administration surely fits the bill but we must realize that any decline is still a choice – we have the power to stop it – even if history is apparently not on our side.
Civilizations in ascendance survive, those in retrograde do not. The signs of regression are all around us – but the answer is in there – WE HAVE A CHOICE. History is not necessarily predictive, we change our personal history every day for better or worse by our choices.
We still can choose our future.
America Is Not a Giant Daycare Center
Are we sure these consequences are unintended?
The racist LBJ was captured on tape, still available in the national archives, telling another racist Senator that they had to hand some power to the uppity negroes to keep them on the plantation but it would keep them voting Democrat for 200 years.
Passing the Civil Rights Act of 1964, after he had opposed Eisenhower's Civil Rights in the 50's made him a hero and got him elected by those who wanted to "do something" . Thus you had total Democrat control of the cities that are now the killing zones of hundreds of thousands in black on black crime where drug gang leaders are the male role models of kids born to an illiterate teen who doesn't know who the absent father is.
The LBJ "Great Society" enabled all of this and the Biden handlers are hard at work to complete the transition to "democratic socialism" which has made Venezuela the utopia it is.