Posted by
darrel on Saturday, November 22, 2008 12:00:00 AM
When our kids were little we looked after them to see to it that little harm came to them. It is the way with parents to hope for the best for their children, and to keep them safe from harm. We told our children not to touch the stove because it might be hot and might burn them, but on occasion, out of curiosity one of them would instead, try to find out on their own. Once burned, that curious child seldom repeated the mistake.
George Santayana cautioned us that if we failed to understand history that we would be fated to repeat it. For those of us old enough to have witnessed some history, that caution is ringing true. Sometimes repeating history is not a bad thing, and if we were repeating what our founders began we would be much better off than repeating the policies of FDR and LBJ.
While most of us with even a public education realize that America was founded on the principles of smaller central government, we are, today, willing to let government take a bigger part in our personal lives. At least, it seems the majority are. When we are willing to let government be the supplier of all or most of our needs, we are surrendering ourselves to bigger, not smaller, central government. Soon we will be paying for the health care of those who failed to take the responsibility of doing for themselves. The government forced right to own a home has proved to be a big failure and now those of us who have shown responsibility for ourselves are forced to pay for those who didn’t.
Social Security, sold as a way for those on the lower end of the pay scale to “supplement” their retirement has become a program that pays as much to those who never contributed as those who did. Now with Medicaid and Medicare, prescription drugs and the like, there suddenly seems to be not enough money to cover the promises made by a bloated central government.
Getting into this mess was a lot easier than finding a way out. Weaning millions of people off of the government teat is going to be much harder that talking them into more government involvement.
We watched in dismay when our “representatives” in congress voted to take almost one trillion of taxpayer dollars to bail out the troubled financial industry, only to see the plan changed at least three times, and now we are told that if government doesn’t bail out the troubled auto industry all is gloom and doom. We are told that government cannot let the big three auto makers fail; that it would be a disaster that we would not be able to recover from.
Santayana was right. Even those of us who were around when FDR and LBJ launched their New Deal and Great Society seem to have forgotten the cost. Those who were not around have failed their history lessons. How many times are we going to get burnt before we learn?