If you were to answer this question honestly, according to your true beliefs, you'd most likely say "yes." It is a near certainty that you believe your neighbor could do something better in some area of life or neighborliness. Perhaps you think they waste money on something they shouldn't or should mow their lawn more or less often than they do. The real question is not if you have differences of opinion, but rather should you be able to enforce your beliefs on others. One must consider that if your opinion can be enforced on others, based on say, a majority of people agreeing with you, then others opinions can be enforced on you, based on the same criteria, where it is opposed to your opinion.
As munipical governments grew larger, a new form of private government arose: gated communities with a housing authority. Generally, these neighborhood governments were formed by the developer, with his rules being the basis, but with consent to governance being granted through purchase of real estate in that neighborhood. The residents agree to a set of common rules and values and have the ability to participate in private micro-governments of a true Jeffersonian type.
The nature of these gated communities vary with the part of the country they are in. A California community is more likely to have rules on recycle bins, lawn care restrictions, and lighting, while a Tennessee covenant is more likely to restrict barnyard animals from a new subdivision, but have no provisions for a rusting car carcass. In the Southeast, property owners are much more likely to believe that what an owner does on his own land is his business. I know of a 5000 sf house that has a mobile home for a neighbor. But in Tennessee, if your cow gets out on the road and hit by a car, you are responsible for the damage caused by the impact of the cow.
In the vein of overall governance, it is clear that some activities must be governed. Rape, murder, and fraud must be considered crimes, but should the government have authority over what type of light bulb you use in your own home, on your own property, or how many quarts of water you purchase to flush a turd down your toilet? The majority of people accept that smoking cigarettes is bad for your health, but should the government have the authority to restrict your right to decide whether or not to smoke on your own property, or even in your owned business? Should one business owner be allowed to open a smoke free bar and the next business owner to open a smoker specialized bar? Or should the government be able to decide that since smoking is bad for your health, that you can't sell alcohol and entertainment to those that partake in such a "risky" behavior?
While most would agree that ensuring children's health is a good thing, should 600 powerful people be able to force you to give a percentage of your wages to a particular means of ensuring kid's health? Should 20 people in your city be able to choose books for your child to read, even if they choose books that teach a moral with which you or your fellow citizens disagree? Should you be forced to pay for those books? Should the power of supply and demand, the power of the purse of huge states like Texas and California be allowed to dictate what is written in the text books of your school in Illinois or Alabama? (They do.)
In these times of financial austerity, we, as a Nation, need to re-evaluate what role government should have in deciding for Citizens what they must purchase. We must decide what is truly the business of government and what are the rights of Free Citizens to decide. We must consider what things our Government must spend Our Money (taxes) on, what they should spend it on, and what is a nice idea, but we can't afford.
There is no such thing as free. If your neighbor is getting a check from the government, it is because taxpayers are sending money to the government (taxes). If they are not paying for their health care, someone else is. If the government is paying for their decision to attain Viagra, or visit an abortion clinic, tax money paid by other citizens is paying for it. When a politician says "someone must do something," it usually means they want a portion of your wages to do something, you may or may not agree with.
The Founding Fathers made clear that the federal government should have authority on only the things it must have responsibility for. They didn't trust governments to maintain purity, and often stated their concerns that encroaching government power would come on the wings of good intentions. They saw that local governments must be empowered, as local governments must be most responsive to the consent of the governed.
National Defense is clearly a Federal Responsibility. Fifty individual states cannot decide individually which weapon systems to buy or where to station Troops. The State of New York cannot set up its own Navy to protect its own goods shipped to Singapore. The Constitution makes clear that Congress is to maintain the US Navy for protection of US goods on the High Seas.
And as with any employer, the care of Veterans' wounds and illnesses, in the service of the Military, is the responsibility of the Government. This is a legal requirement, as well as a moral imperitive. It is deeply saddening to see rich, former Generals, like Shinseki (DVA Secretary), endorse plans by the POTUS to charge successful Veterans for their care of their war wounds, or force Veterans to use sub-standard civilian health care plans, just because they have access to it, when they earned their contractual retirement package, on their battered bodies with substandard pay. And why is it necessary to charge Veterans for what they've earned? In order to give health insurance to those that have no or little earnings!?!?
The government is often convicted of responsibility for unemployment or poor economics, but what is the role of government in employing individuals or economic growth? Should the government employ the unemployed and does the government determine whether businesses succeed or fail? Businesses succeed when people buy what they're selling. Much of that is international sales, but the government does impact how well a business can get their goods to market, even if it's not all that great at determining what goods should be produced or developed for production.
For decades, the government, or I should politicians in government, have wanted to stimulate the production of higher mileage vehicles, and electric vehicles, yet the results have been pretty unrewarding. One example was the subsidization of purchases of electric vehicles in recent years. Many of the rich got free electric golf carts, which they likely would have purchased on their own, but did nothing towards creating true demand for electric cars, nor furthered the development of electric cars.
But electric cars have been developed, as have "hybrids" which tout astounding miles per gallon, because they rely on electric power for many of those miles, burning no gasoline. The drivers of these cars can smugly point to the lack of CO2 emissions from their tailpipes, but does that mean that none is produced by the energy used to move from point A to B? No, it just concentrates where those emissions are taking place. Those drivers may even drive past the power plant and complain of the emissions of the plant that is producing the energy they are using in their electric car. It changes whom they are paying for the energy for moving their car, where they are getting the car refueled with energy, how aware they are of the production of that energy, but it does not change the fact that the energy is produced.
And before that, politicians pushed for development and implementation of ethanol, despite the fact that it uses food for fuel, uses more energy to produce than the resulting product produces, and is more detrimental to those that breath its by-products. In a world where many go hungry, politicians are paying corporations and farmers to burn food, decreasing the supply of food and driving up the price of food. The US Government is forcing you to drive up food prices and forcing you to pay for it.
On the other hand, the education of American children is the responsibility of local governments. The US Deparment of Education enrolls exactly zero students. But there are approximately 62.9 million school age children in the US and about 209 million working age adults. Rather than looking at in individual city, we can point out that there are approximately 3.3 working age adults per child that should be in school. A single teacher can teach approximately 24-30 students. So, if we go with the one classroom, approximately 792 to 990 adults can contribute to the cost of each classroom, including textbooks, classroom, and other equipment.
Using recent estimates, that class costs between $240,000 and $300,000/year. That means it costs about $303 per working age adult to educate a kid. Of course if 10% of those adults are unemployed, their part must be paid by others, so $334/adult. And many are neither employed, nor unemployed, but rather just don't work. Reality is, it's closer to $450 for each worker for that class.
That doesn't sound like much, but it is only one public employee that those 990 adults must pay for. We also need to pay for firefighters, police officers, and unfortunately politicians, along with their secretaries, bureacrats, and tax agents. If we want the municipality to provide us water and sewage, and parks, we have to pay for that as well. If we want government to provide everyone with telephone and electricity or bus transportation, those too have to be paid. So, when the city budget shrinks with the number of employed non-government citizens, what should or should not get cut?
Should the teacher be laid off because you don't have a kid in school? Should the firefighter be laid off because you haven't had a fire? Should the police officer be laid off because you've never needed them to write a crime report? Or would it be better to reduce the nice to have services like phone (hypothetically) services?
When a family comes under financial hardship, they are forced to choose between things they want and things must have. They don't always choose well, but they have to make the choice. They may be able to subsidize a lack of income with an unused portion of credit, but this works only for a certain amount of time. It wouldn't be wise for such a family to priortize purchases of video games over the purchase of food, or transportation to a source of income. But in today's world of national politics, politicians are trying to cut things we need, like the military, while increasing the payments that might be nice, like paying for a cell phone for welfare recipients.
And citizens of all stripes find it easy to justify taking "free money" from the government. There's very likely a government program out there that will pay you to do something you enjoy. If not, you can find a way to create one. These are often called "grants" under the guise of research, like the multi-year study that found out that people make bad decisions more often when they drink too much alcohol, or that they're more likely to be enticed into consensual sex when a little alcohol is added to the mix.
If the Federal Government offered you a free golf cart (which it has given away to many people), would you turn it down? But who actually paid for those golf carts? And who truly benefitted from taxpayers buying "free" golf carts? If you got one, you didn't get a bill for a golf cart. Every American got a bill for "taxes" and most (other than Obama supporter General Electric/NBC) paid that tax bill, paying for the bureacrats that collected the taxes, those that managed the budgets, and those that wrote the checks for the golf cart, but it was the maker of the golf cart and its components (like GE) that made money off the deal that put a golf cart in your inventory by charging taxes to your neighbor and you, without telling you that is what it was for.
Why do you think corporations pay millions in advertising goods (like electric wheel chairs) that won't be charged to you? They'll gladly do the paperwork for you, so that they get a check from the federal government, for a device they send to you? You pay the bill, in the form of taxes.
When I was sent to Afghanistan, I was almost "stop-lossed" for the deployment. Had that occurred, I'd now be eligible to receive a big check for those months that I was "forced" to stay in the military. I wanted to be stop-lossed at the time, because it would have meant I could re-enlist and get my bonus for doing so in a tax-free combat zone, but since Congress had decided not to offer a bonus to me at the time, I just went ahead and re-enlisted to go. Do you think I'd turn down that big fat check had my plan worked out? Do you think the guy that did manage to work such a plan deserves to get that check more than I would? Afterall, he already got the tax-free re-enlistment bonus.
And did the guy that got stop-lossed serve $500/month more honorably than I did? Or were we both fulfilling the obligations that we signed a contract to do? Why is it that the current US Administration is so intent on paying those that were stop-lossed in 2003, while it cuts pay increases and bonuses for those serving today? Why is it increasing the number of combat commitments of the Nation, while simultaneously calling for cuts in the number of people available to fulfill those commitments? Why is there a looming threat from the current US Administration to not pay Troops their next paycheck (due to 2010 Federal Budget debate) while the civilian employees have been guaranteed pay, even if the government shuts down?
Do you think your neighbor spends too much money on sugars, alcohol, caffeine, and/or tobacco? Does he think you spend too much money on gasoline, cars, and jacuzzis? Just remember, when you call (or support) the government in restricting your neighbors' decisions to make bad choices, you're also supporting his right to build a consensus to restrict your rights to make choices he doesn't like.
How much money should the government be able to take from your earnings for things you disagree with, because your neighbor knows better than you what you should spend your money on/ (Or just knows how to get the government to buy him a golf cart?)
Stumble It!