Oh, no, you broke your government
(and now you want to break it some more)
The Law of the Instrument says, “It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.”
Surely only one so short-sighted would read this article which says
In fact, [Andreas Antonopoulos] even goes as far as to say the banks in America have formed a cartel, far more successful and far more powerful than any drug cartel in history. And if you think about it, he’s not wrong.
The banks have found a way to continuously bribe politicians and legislators, abuse and overstretch the power of the executive branch, and get consistently get rewarded for breaking the law. In every other country but America, we call this a cartel.
and respond
The easiest way to deal with the issues of power that you speak of is to reduce the footprint of government.
The argument the follows is increasingly revealing as it goes:
Like you say, power corrupts, and every time the government expands a little further with this program or that department or this initiative or that committee, the more power they get. Each step only serves to better enable the next step and the step after. Before you know it, a corrupt governing body is the patriarch of the average citizen’s life.
Let me summarize the argument — “power corrupts, therefore government is inherently corrupt and will always take over all power”.
I hear this argument from Americans all the time — they should learn to understand that it’s just American government that is broken, and the rest of the developed world is doing much better.
For example, I now live in the Netherlands and it’s a country that’s living proof that this idea is wrong.
The Dutch get efficient, quality of goods and services out of their government, as well as public works and planning for the future.
There has been no “patriarch of the average citizen’s life” — America has useless freedoms we don’t need, like a right to own a gun or the right to spend unlimited money to promulgate provable lies, and we have freedoms Americans should want, like privacy, and healthcare, and the right not to die in the fucking street when you run out of money as happened to at least one person I knew when I lived in the USA (and perhaps at least one other has not been seen in a long time).
The Dutch have few natural resources and very little land, resulting in only two-thirds the GDP per person that the US does, and yet the average person here lives fair better, more comfortable, more secure and more relaxed lives than the average American does. Healthcare costs are never an issue for anyone ever. Healthcare outcomes are amongst the best in the entire world, far better than America’s at about half the cost per person, even though the Netherlands do not have the economies of scale that the US should enjoy.
The Netherlands, like the US, did a huge build-up of infrastructure after WW2 — but the Netherlands has already rebuilt all of this once decades ago, and is already rebuilding some of it for the second time, whereas the US hasn’t even rebuilt it once in many places, particularly in the power and water grids.
And it isn’t just the Netherlands. Almost all the world’s developed economies have a similar social democratic system with a big, competent government, resulting in a happier, healthier, longer-lived population and modern infrastructure.
Yes, there is more money to spend because the rest of the developed world generally doesn’t set out to have huge, profitless and eventually losing wars against imaginary enemies. Again, thanks are due to more or less competent governments. (Don’t get me wrong here — the rest of the developed world does some pretty dumb things, but the Iraq War alone cost more than the next ten dumb things of the last twenty years put together.)
We could do better — we strive to do better — but we don’t just throw up our hands and say, “Tear it all down, and give all power to the Free Market Fairy and her magic wand Innovation”!
It’s mostly Americans that go around claiming that corrupt, inept, overreaching government is the natural state of affairs everywhere and only very roughly 30% of them at that.
And it’s those same 30% nihilistic Americans who desperately want to tear down the government by any means, even if that means the government being looted by the rich — it’s these very same 30% who are the actual cause of the government’s steady collapse.
One hundred million Americans oppose any regulation in the slightest on America’s exploitative, dishonest, inefficient, polluting, rapacious companies and corporations, with the result that the US has areas of unremitting squalor, poverty, and misery worse than in many developing countries.
Some thirty percent of Americans are so in love with destroying the government that they can’t even conceive of the idea of a functioning, effective government, a government that can actually perform great works, and so those thirty percent by their very existence break the government.
It’s an inexplicable blindness and unfortunately seems resistant to any reason, example or argument. And it is destroying America and pulling the rest of us down with it.
—
(It turns out that the writer of the original article, the one that identifies the banks as cartels, is also in favor of reducing government, which shows that you can be good at identifying problems and really bad at fixing them. Come on, man, take a look at the rest of the world and get a clue!)
