GOVERNMENT AND THE STATE

Preamble:

On September 10^th, 2001,the  then US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld publicly reported that the astronomical sum of 2.3 trillion dollars had somehow been lost in Pentagon transactions and could not be found. Apparently, there was not much of a follow-up--- not only because of the tragedy of 9/11 the next day, but also because massive misappropriations of funds were increasingly becoming the norm of the United States Government conducting its bloated business. By the end of the George W. Bush Administration the amount of misappropriated money stood well in excess of four trillion dollars, and this ignominious “malpractice” was not about to stop under the next Administration, having become systemic…

Big government is by no means bad government, as some clever, but dishonest populists love to claim. Big or small, good government is an honest government, accountable to the people for every dollar it receives in taxes and other revenues and making no effort to deceive the public about the ways it conducts business.

Bad government is not an incompetent government: a great nation will never tolerate one. Bad government is a competent, but malicious government, which may use incompetent fools as scapegoats, but scapegoats do not constitute the essence of government.

Good government does not all of a sudden lose track of trillions of dollars and pretend that it is business as usual. Accounting accidents measured in misappropriated millions may be the fault of some small or mid-level administrators, but an inexplicable loss of trillions is very bad government, plain and simple. There is no way good government can lose so much money, and then maliciously expect to get away with it.

Good government balances its budget, big or small. It does not pretend to lower people’s taxes, while at the same time running huge deficits, which are effectively robbing the people’s children and grandchildren and surreptitiously swell an already huge government size to literally unimaginably enormous proportions.

It goes without saying that I am a champion of good government, which for quite some time now I find in ridiculously short supply. When I see bad government, I want it as small as possible, but if I can have good government, I do not mind it being big at all.

I cannot say that I am a champion of big government per se. I am a champion of the State that takes care of its citizens and of its national interest first and foremost. If the government of the State represents national interest and takes proper care of its citizens, then more power to it! But if the Government has betrayed the interests of the State and of its people, in favor of special interests and foreign agendas, I despise such kind of government, and obviously consider it too much already, so that the less of it, the better. In other words, I am a statist, and I always see government through the prism of the state. As long as there is no disconnect here, I am all for big government, but otherwise, I am by no means a supporter of such a dishonesty.