Why A Strong National Government Matters
I have a lot of sympathy for the folks who have turned out for the “Occupy …” demonstrations. Most of the people who have shown up have genuine grievances — many boil down to the statement, “I did all of the things I was supposed to do, and here I am barely keeping body and soul together.” This is the point of congruence that exists between the Tea Party and the Occupy Wall St. protesters — the sense that people are being punished even though they had followed the rules. I agree with the Tea Party folks that taxes ill spent are taxes that should not have been collected in the first place. Where I disagree with the Tea Party is that government is an unmitigated evil. Anybody who says that is simply ignorant of history. In the first place, the founders of our country sought to create a strong national government in the wake of international and national events that took place in the decade following independence and the birth of the nation. They viewed it as an absolute necessity that the federal government had to have the power to collect taxes and fight wars in order to protect the nation. Go back and read the preamble if you have any doubts on the score of the desire on the part of the founders for a strong national government — lines like “provide for common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty” speak to the desire of the founders to build a real nation capable of caring for its borders and ensuring the welfare of all of the people within those borders is patently clear. The attempt to “strangle the beast” is not only futile and wrong-headed — it flies in the face of the wishes of the founders that we enjoy all of the blessings of a vital national government that protects the rights of the individual and and is built on the sense of responsibility that is born out of freedom and pride in belonging to the national polity that was and is the United States of America. The concept of the self-made person who does not build on the resources and acts of those who have come before is a myth best codified by Ayn Rand — but it has no reality as John Scalzi has said, Atlas Shrugged is ” …a totally ridiculous book which can be summed up as Sociopathic idealized nerds collapse society because they don’t get enough hugs… Indeed, the enduring popularity of Atlas Shrugged lies in the fact that it is nerd revenge porn.” The idea that the extraordinary individual stands above and outside and indeed has no need of society is blind and ignorant of the amazing support that society lends in the shape of culture and laws and infrastructure that we all rely upon to have the amazing lives which we have even in these terrible times. Think — the crime level is lower than at any time in history — more children live that are born than ever before — each of us has the chance at a life that the richest person of two hundred years ago could simply not have attained no matter their wealth. Yet, at the same time, there are still major problems with the way that our society is structured. The fact that real wages have stagnated for the majority of the population of the United States suggests that things are broken. It’s time for us to become a bit more rigorous in our approach to defining the root causes of the Great Recession, because in this case, the problems of our national body politic and the problems embodied in the collapse of our economy are related.
