The Government Should Do Something About It

How many times have you heard someone say that the Government should do something about some ill?  You listen to the news and find out that restaurants are passing Tilapia off as a more expensive fish.  Why doesn’t the government do something about it?  You fill your tank up with gasoline at $4 a gallon and say why doesn’t the government do something about the price.  BP spills billions of gallons of unrefined oil into the Gulf of Mexico because of a flaw in their drilling mechanism and people yell that the government should have prevented it.  You can’t swim in the lake because it is polluted and you want to know why the government doesn’t clean it up.

How about some idiot who just wants your vote screaming that Social Security is under funded and taxes are too high so the budget must be drastically cut?  And then someone comes around saying they are not part of the Democratic or Republican Party but subscribe to the more populist Libertarian Party.  What a bunch of Bull.

Lets take these in reverse order to demonstrate how all of them are taking us as fools.  The basis of the Libertarian Party is to let businesses run everything.  They use phrases such as Free Market but they don’t want our consumerism to make the rules, they want unregulated businesses to decide what is best.  Take away all the regulations and regulators with cute ads about letting us choose what we eat but that is hiding the elephant behind a toothpick.  Oil companies set the drilling rules in the Gulf and that caused the BP spill.  No government inspector got the captain of the Valdese drunk off the shore of Alaska.  It was government regulators who stopped Thalidomide from being sold in the U.S. even though it was available in Europe.  Unregulated dumping of human and chemical waste into the Great Lakes limits swimming, boating, and fishing. You want the government to “do something about it” then you need regulations and inspectors.

Now cutting the budget is a good idea but cutting fat, not inspections and regulations.  That is what is being eliminated under the new budget proposals.  Large political contributors want to get rid of costly regulations to increase their profits and politicians who advocate the elimination of trillions of dollars in spending are looking out for them, not us.

Will our prices come down? NO.  We are the market and if we are willing to spend $5 on a gallon of gasoline then the price is set regardless of how much it costs to produce.  If we are not willing, then the price will lower.  If the United States invests in other forms of energy then our prices will come down. 

Small computers cost $20,000 in the 70’s and programs were little better than word processors, spread sheets, and Pong.  We refused to spend that much and 30 years later they cost $2,000 with a multitude of programs and the internet.  Phones had Party lines to lower the cost and today families have a land line and multiple cell phones.  We are the Market, not multi national corporations.

Grossly cutting the federal budget is not the answer.  There are places where it can be fixed but to slice trillions of dollars will only increase our costs.