Overt government power grabs...how reckless are they?

[John_James]

@Clayton

Nevertheless - as someone who doesn’t think 9/11 was an accident and who believes that the Elites believe we are living in a “new era” since they staged their little coup in NYC 11 years ago - I believe that the government is in “overdrive” and is more reckless than ever, that is, less afraid to stick its neck out legally because it’s all but certain that they’ll get away with anything they do. If worse comes to worst, they can always cry “national security! terrorism!” and whatever crime they committed is magically swept away.

You’re right about the “national security” claim, as of course they use that all the time as it is now. (Check out here, and of course the soldier’s response here.) And you’re also right about what they’ll try. I don’t know if I’d use the term “reckless”, but of course there’s always going to be a push for more government growth…

as Jefferson said: The natural progress of things is for liberty to yeild, and government to gain ground.

And then of course Frederick Douglass: Find out just what a people will submit to, and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them; [the quote usually stopps there, but the rest is interesting…] and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both.

As for efficiency, I think the old conservative line that “government is inefficient” has to be carefully circumscribed - government is only inefficient at what it claims it is about. That is, it’s inefficient at paving the roads, patrolling the streets, investigating crimes, securing the borders, helping the poor, and so on. But governments everywhere in the world are the very model of efficiency in regard to what their true, praxeological ends are (parasitic subsistence, war-making, etc.)

I think this is where we disagree. They may be more efficient at power grabbing and oppression than actually performing services people want, but that doesn’t mean they’re stretching the pennies as far as they’ll go. There are other things that hurt efficiency other than simply not being very interested to do what you’re charged with doing. For one thing the interests don’t always align. Something one powerful man wants often conflicts with something another wants. (Indeed many times the confict exists simply because the one man doesn’t like the other). So there is a constant inside struggle that impedes the outside progress. The current LIBOR scandal is kind of a good illustration of this. “It’s basically about 16 banksters in a room not doing a very effective job of trying to screw each other.”

Then of course the bureaucracy itself is a huge handicapp. It doesn’t matter how interested you are in doing something, red tape like our government has is going to hold you back. This also sort of plays into the diseconomies of scale, like Doug French was talking about.

While I agree they’re certainly better at bombing people than keeping the domestic highways up to par, that certainly doesn’t mean they’re the models of efficiency by any means.

This is why the tax freedom types try foregoing filing a 1040. But then, they have other ways of dealing with that.

That’s why stuff like this intrigues me.