Bow Your Head

Reading news on the web makes me feel like the iris in the lead photo today. Do people elect clueless congressmen and presidents because that is what they really want or because there is not a lot of choice?  Often people who run for public office are failures at everything else, but somehow find a place in government where they continue to fail. This seems to be the case with so many of our current elected officials. The policies of the Roosevelt era prolonged the depression for years longer than the depression would have lasted if the government had done nothing and let market forces work to correct the markets. This is well known and historically documented from the various depressions before the "great depression" that were short lived due to no government intervention. 

But what does the current government do? Replay the policies of the Roosevelt era and then act surprised when unemployment gets worse, the housing market continues to tumble and inflation is on the rise. They try to distract us with raids on countries we have no strategic interest in, and say they killed a terrorist who has done nothing for the past 10 years, if he was even alive and present when the raid went down, hoping we will not notice the bad economic news. Murder and mayhem sell well on TV and in the movies, shouldn't that make for a popular president?

On top of all that, the US government has been smuggling guns to the drug cartels in Mexico, and the attorney general says he didn't know anything about it! Right! I guess he's been too busy suing a lady who blocked the door of an abortion clinic to notice the BATF is the largest source of illegal guns going from the US to Mexico. Obama has long held that most of the guns that end up in Mexico come from gun shows in the US, but when not that many guns from the US had actually shown up among the hundred thousand or so guns confiscated in Mexico by the Mexican government, the Obama administration decided they needed to be more proactive to ensure more guns from the US made their way to Mexico to make their case; so the Obama administration started its own smuggling operation called "gunrunner."  It also turns out that the few guns that did come from the  US had been reported multiple times, so the data on the number of guns with serial numbers traceable to the US confiscated in Mexico had be inflated 5 to 10 times by the BATF, until closer scrutiny caught the error.

Then there is the issue of government spending. Instead of reducing spending like most people and businesses do when they don't have enough income to cover expenses, governments are looking for more ways to tax people. California is looking at hiring Internet police to track Californians' on-line purchases and then bill them a use tax. If that goes through, other states will follow since most states have use tax laws that go back way before the Internet. Obama is looking at tax per mile driven on cars, which is simply designed to reduce driving since he thinks we should all use public transportation. The private automobile is one of the single most important vehicles that help people improve their economic status, because they have little restriction of getting better employment when that have the freedom of driving a car. The current government wants none of that!  It is doing everything it can to kill the private transportation.

The nanny state without end is depressing and makes me want to hang my head like the poor, cold-damaged iris.