Thursday, August 20, 2015

Out-Of-Control Big Government Is Destroying Us



Social observers from Aristotle and Juvenal to James Madison and George Orwell have all warned of the dangers of out-of-control government. Lately, we have seen plenty of proof that they were frighteningly correct.

The Environmental Protection Agency spilled 3 million gallons of toxic sludge into a tributary of the Animas River in Colorado. The stinky yellow flume of old mine waste — rife with cancer-causing mercury and arsenic — threatens to pollute the drinking and recreational water of three states.

Had a private oil company acted so incompetently and negligently, it would have been fined billions of dollars by the same EPA. The company's top executives might have been subject to criminal prosecutions. The business' reputation would have been tarnished for years. Just ask BP officials what the Obama administration did to the corporation after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill of 2010 in the Gulf of Mexico.
But who'll police the green police at the EPA?...

What is the common denominator in these government scandals — as well as the recent scandals involving the needless deaths of veterans waiting for care at Veterans Health Administration facilities, the sex and booze escapades of Secret Service agents, the Las Vegas junketing at the General Services Administration, the snooping at the National Security Agency and the lack of cyber-security at Office of Personnel Management?
The bigger government gets, the more employees are hired, and the more unaccountable power accrues to bureaucracies, the more government takes on a life of its own. Public grandees resemble Hollywood's out-of-control androids or Frankenstein monsters that turn on their creators — in these cases, the taxpayers.

Secure, high-level government administrative jobs — where dismissal is rare and automatic promotion common — promote mediocrity. Institutionalized incompetence explains why NASA can no longer launch its own astronauts into space without help from Russia, or why the cost of the California high-speed rail project soars before an inch of track is laid....

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