VDH completely exposes the socialistic 'emporers', here and in Europe, who have no clothes.
VDH ping.
Sorry, but this one is not simple. The thing we need to get rid of is the system set in place in 1913 which basically implemented Alexander Hamilton's idea about using government debt as a main basis for money.
Under present rules, government BORROWS money into existence and we sit around paying interest on money which banks create out of thin air while, clearly, if anybody trusted governments to do it, they could as easily create money out of thin air themselves with no interest being owed.
Austerity IS bad for business and we need a real solution, but simplicity is not likely to be part of that solution.
Austerity of the indolent class means growth for the productive class. Government, like friction, is a parasitic force, and too much of either prevents the machinery from working.
We pay a high price for mathematical ignorance. The typical voter has no concept of the level of gov’t debt or how it affects his or her economic well-being. Consider this simplified, linear representation of spending and growth. The actual process is difficult to model using even the most complex mathematics but many core principles can be expressed simply.
For every dollar a private citizen productively earns and then spends, economic activity is increased by one dollar. As productivity increases and more people contribute productive work to the economy, growth occurs. For every dollar gov’t spends, economic activity is increased by one dollar less the amount required to pay for past gov’t spending. It takes tax revenues and dilution to increase gov’t spending. Growth can occur if gov’t enables productivity increases but is more difficult because of past debt overhead. Gov’t spending is also not as efficiently targeted or timed as when a private citizen spends.
Increasing taxes takes money out of the private citizen’s discretionary spending ability and reduces the fast, effectively-targeted spending which that citizen engages.
Of course, gov’t’s past debt is now at a very high level in the US and we can see in Greece how that cannot be increased forever without consequence. Dilution (inflate/default yourself out of debt) eventually becomes the only way out.
Austerity should apply uniquely to government. Less government means more wealth for all. So the very purpose of government boils down to just two things: defending the nation from external threats; and protecting its citizens from abuse by subordinate governments, private organizations, and criminal individuals.
This does not equate to small government, just *efficient* government. It also means accepting several very powerful axioms.
1) The civil rights of individuals are more important than governmental control, and the civil rights of individuals are more important than the *desires* of others to impinge on those rights, for whatever reason.
2) Foreign nations and citizens can be seen as “friends” only if they are real democracies. But they can only be seen as “partners” temporarily, to achieve goals outside of the United States. As such, international treaties are only legitimate if they do not impinge on our individual civil rights *or* our sovereignty.
3) Government invariably seeks more power than it is authorized, often through insidious means such as largess and judicial precedent. So we must not be shy in both *popularly* recognizing what is unconstitutional, and in the case of established systems, to come up with a philosophy of systematically reducing, then eliminating them, while causing as little harm to the citizenry as possible.
That some bitterly protest that they “do good” must be countered that for every benefit they bestow, they create even more harm in the long run, and that there is no justice in government helping one person if it hinders others who will have to pay for it.
Now, this being said, worshiping at the idol of “growth” or “productivity” is also illusory, because it measures success using a national, not individual scale. “Productivity” is greatest when there is slavery, for profits are high and costs are low. “Growth” just means the concentration of wealth and resources for an increasingly limited number of people to manage.
This leads to the largest potential area for reasonable government growth, the regulation of the activities of those who desire growth and productivity to insure that which reaching for those goals, they do not impinge on the civil rights of other citizens.
Yet this function of government should be exclusively in the realm of limiting or preventing abuse; not to unfairly provide for those who do not, or no longer pursue growth and productivity in their own lives.
This means that government largess must end. And while they can legitimately create a legal mechanism for individuals to create this for themselves, government should not force it, nor redistribute funds from the productive to the non-productive, for doing so is unjust to the former group.