Amerika

A new revolution is gripping America, and un-doing the revolution of 1968. Instead of radical humanists rebelling against materialists, it’s pragmatic people rebelling against a calcified liberal government that has become parasitic and corrupt.

Back in the 1960s, we had a revolution in the West. It was a peaceful one, arising from a groundswell of discontent. Its basic message was that our society had gotten sidetracked by materialism, and forgotten the human.

Now we’ve got another revolution — one that says whether we pick humanism or materialism, the dogma replaces the reality, and our society drifts into complacent oblivion. Where in the 1950s a rising corporate culture emphasized a vapid pursuit of material comfort, in the 2000s a rising humanist culture has created a haven for selfishness of another kind.

The modern West has become a willing host to any parasite willing to show up, repeat our official dogma of equality, diversity and freedom, and then take whatever we hand out. In our zeal to escape the stodgy 1950s cash culture, we have created another cash culture — one that supports people just for being human. In just 42 years we have reversed direction and found ourselves facing the exact same problem.

As a result, our government has become a parasite. In addition to throwing trillions of dollars into welfare programs that do not consider whether the individuals they subsidize are contributing at all to the common good, government itself has grown to an immense size.

Let’s look at what government means to the average person:

• More paperwork than ever before. To get a house built, a business established, or even deal with the death of a family member, we must navigate a vast bureaucracy. Inevitably this means paying experts and lawyers.
• Government views us as a cash cow. Fees have gone up, and practices like the creation of de facto speed traps have continued to drain citizens, without any regard for whether these people are contributing members of society who need a break, or repeat lawbreakers.
• In addition to hiring legions of consultants and contractors, most of whom get placed at the front of the line for being minority- or female-owned, government has surged in size and pay for bureaucrats, even as efficiency has declined.
• The rise in bureaucracy and tendency to hand it over to people without considering their competence has created a culture of corruption that “threatens the fabric of the US”, according to the FBI. It even reaches the White House.
• Government now operates in “moral” humanistic mode, which means that it supports any idea no matter how impractical which endorses our holy trinity of secular humanity — equality, diversity and freedom — while ignoring the consequences. As a result, we now have legions of diversity consultants, counselors, educators, presenters and other nonsense “make-work” bureaucrats.
• Having this many relatively incompetent but highly paid people causes them to seek to justify their position by publicly enforcing laws rabidly, and starting all sorts of new and pointless programs. The origin of the Nanny State is not an Orwellian desire for control by the state, but a desire by incompetent individuals to justify their salaries.

No matter how we cut it, this means government has become a parasite. It takes from the productive, and gives to the unproductive. Even if we object to measuring life through money, we have to recognize that rewarding the good means that they have an incentive to outperform others. It’s that incentive that is the foundation of evolution and natural selection as well as any healthy society.

I’ll spare you the comparisons to Communism and instead make a comparison to 1776 and 1968. In 1776, bureaucrats from England were taking money from the productive colonies and using it to prop up their failing empire. In 1968, fat dumb guys in suits were in such a mania to profit from the post-war boom that they forgot their souls.

And now in 2010, the same pattern is repeated. We thought humanism was an antidote to soullessness just like we thought revolution was an antidote to bad leadership. Once we slayed the dragon, we thought we could blow off the problem for the interim. But now we see that the dragon regenerates, because wherever we stop paying attention, parasitism grows.

If anything is going to drive the Tea Partiers — and they now have similar movements in the USA, UK and mainland Europe — to success, it’s going to be that the average functional citizen recognizes that government is sabotaging what he or she is doing. That sabotage then pays for the dysfunctional, who cause more than their share of social problems.

The left has rebelled with their same-old slogans and objections. They are trying to prove that the Tea Party goes against the values of 1968 — that’s the blind equality, diversity and freedom dogma — so that they can debunk the Tea Party. But the problem is that Tea Partiers are objecting on a pragmatic ground, which is that in the name of fairness and anti-materialism, we have become cancerous and self-consumptive.

When the left was rebelling against a calcified culture of materialism, they at least had some degree of accuracy — even if their methods were bad. Now that what the left created has become just as calcified, the right has taken over and adopted their methods. In the middle, the citizens who have been ignoring politics in order to have careers and raise families have started to notice, and they’re siding with the Tea Partiers.

Tags: big-government, government, libertarianism, red tape, tea party