The stupidity of big government

There is no doubt that NSW is in a mess. Well, at least the public sector portion of the economy. The private sector trundles on, albeit dragging a larger millstone around its neck, because decisions in the private sector are distributed and driven by market forces. If businesses persist with stupid ideas or bad management, well, they cease to persist once the money runs out. If they sell rotten products or offer lousy service, they cease to be. If they are run by incompetent leadership, the market sorts them out eventually. Businesses don't all go broke on a single day once every four years. Lousy businesses go bust every day. A single failure can bring them unstuck at any time, which means they have to be constantly vigilant, always on the lookout for opportunities and forever seeking to do things in a better way.

I was told yesterday that one of the leading indicators of economic activity is the sale of Volvo trucks. It has been running at something like 15,000 per whatever period they normally look at.

In the current period, it is 45.

Shit.

Anyway, ever since Carr got into power, the only constant in NSW has been bigger and bigger government. I think that lefties are forever growing government because people make stupid decisions, and lefties don't like that. They want people to be protected from their own stupidity, so they force government to intervene in their lives and to make decisions for them.

Take health care for instance. Lefties think that stupid bogan westies are too stupid to make a sensible decision about their health care needs, so we get Medicare. However, those stupid bogan westies make decisions everyday on what ugg boots to wear, what sort of mags to put on their 1987 Commodore and what type of enormous flat screen TV they should steal to put in their lounge room. These people are not stupid. They know which dealer is selling the best heroin this week. They know how to scam oodles of money out of Centrelink. They know how to cheat their way into public housing and how to avoid paying taxes of all sorts. They can make decisions for themselves.

But just because a few wastoids would prefer to spend every last cent on heroin instead of buying health insurance, we need to pay a compulsory levy to give them health insurance. And of course the levy does not cover them, because they are lying on a soiled mattress somewhere with a needle in their arm and their baby screaming in the corner instead of flipping burgers at the nearest McRatfucks.

So government exists to save us from our own stupidity. It gets bigger and bigger in order to make our lives better.

And what do we get after 12 years of this?

We get NSW.

We get a rolled gold, diamond encrusted monkey turd.

How did that happen? Isn't government supposed to make smarter decisions than individuals can make for themselves?

What these lefty idiots forget is that the people who are in government are no different to you and I and every other Joe Blow in the street.

Let us assume that the Premier and Cabinet decided that Mr Kafoops of 91 Thicktwiddle Way is too stupid to decide which school he should send his kids to. So the government takes away his right to decide, and vests it in a new department called "Excellence in school placements", which is usally shortened to sound like "excrement".

And guess who works in that deparment?

Mr Kafoops and his wife, Mrs Kafoops. The same people who are too stupid to make a decision about where to send their kids are now deciding where the rest of us should send our kids. Instead of 5% of the population making stupid decisions, we now have stupid decisions forced upon 100% of us.

I've heard that described as "spreading the misery around".

But the lefties are happy because stupid people are freed from the burden of making stupid decisions, and with the time saved, they can afford to break into and steal from another house this week. That's about the only group who achieve a productivity gain from actions like this.

Lefties are also happy because the new department has added 500 new members to the relevant public sector union, which means more money in their coffers which they can then use to keep the Labor party in power for another term, which should mean yet another wave of new members after each election.

I have to laugh everytime I hear Obama promising that his government will do this, that and something else for everybody. Governments are very effective at extracting taxes from people, and utterly crap at doing just about everything else. I know - I have worked in government, and seen what it is like from the inside. Government agencies have a desperate need to install themselves into important looking buildings so that they give an impression of competence and solidity - just as banks used to put up buildings with enormous marble foyers and granite entrances and Greek columns. They wanted you to think that they would look after your money after you gave it to them. They need you to think that they are not a fly-by-night operation.

Government departments are the same - you'll never find one operating out of a shitty office. They want you to think that they are lean and mean and sleek and operating amazingly efficiently, when out the back is a scene of utter mayhem and catastrophe as one debacle piles up after another. You can only sustain the facade for so long, as the government of NSW has found to its cost. Bob Carr was a master at it, but he was also smart enough to recognise when the veneer was about to wear off and that it was therefor time to go.