While most who know me know my stance on whether or not the government should spend more of our money on bailing out banks and companies who made poor decisions (and if you didn't then that sentence should have helped clear things up); I thought I would share just a couple of thoughts.
1- Every dollar our government spends is a dollar taken away from the private sector. If they are spending it then they are, in effect, saying that they feel they will do a better job with that money than individuals would. I don't agree with that line of thought. While there are plenty of examples that have come to light recently of how the private sector has squandered their finances, I believe we would do a bette job of spending our money than our government would. I also believe that with the responsibility of spending our own money we should suffer the consequences of poor decisions and feel the thrill of good decisions.
2- I think that the "debate" on whether or not the stimulus is necessary has been embarrassingly non-existent. Republicans have been railroaded in their arguments. Obama's statement that he is working in a bi-partisan fashion just means he is telling those who disagree with him that he heard them but if they love the American people they would vote for what he wants. This is not what our elected officials should be doing. They should be spending less time trying to control the nation and more time trying to manage it as the representative they are.
3- To quote George Washington: "Government is not reason; it is not eloquent; it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master." Why on earth do we want to make it bigger? And why do some think that the government is responsible for solving problems when they, in many cases, are the problem?
Finally, regardless of how poorly I think our government is currently operating, I agree 100% with Adam Smith who stated in the Wealth of Nations:
"The uniform, constant and uninterrupted effort of every man to better his condition, the principle from which public and national, as well as private opulence is originally derived, is frequently powerful enough to maintain the natural progress of things toward improvement, in spite both of the extravagance of government, and of the greatest errors of administration. Like the unknown principle of animal life, it frequently restores health and vigor to the constitution, in spite, not only of the disease, but of the absurd prescriptions of the doctor."
In other words, we will get out of this regardless of what our apparently ignorant government decides to do. We just most likely will be back in trouble in a few years given their current plans. My hope is that by then we as a people have woken up to the ills of having such a large government and we will vote in representatives who will put the responsibility back onto us.
3 weeks ago
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2 comments:
Agreed. While a random $1000 check in the mail would be nice, would it really be the answer? Like has been pointed, the stimulus that needs to be made is not in quick cash to various companies and individuals. In essence, I think this is a classic example of teaching a man to fish. If you stimulate growth in business from the inside out (exaclty how you do that, I'm not quite sure) you will have much greater growth, but if you give free hand outs and then cripple the persons ability to do for themselves through higher taxes and more regulations, you're certainly not allowing people to learn how to fish and then to do it.
While I understand the arguments for a redistribution of wealth and equality of all people, I agree with you completely that the government should not take it on themselves to fix the inequality of the system (in my opinion this stimulus and the tax "rebates" are nothing more than a thinly masked attempt at redistribution). Let people spend their own money. Or maybe, instead of bailing companies out they can create incentives for people to shop a certain way, like by giving tax exemptions for people who buy domestic cars. That way, our money would benefit all of the people along the supply chain rather than just the company and factories. Evidently common sense isn't common.
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