Control

Doc Zero has a peice on the growing controls that our "betters" place on us. For our own good you see.

Political control is what’s killing us. It is expressed in hundreds of ways: high tax rates with carefully tailored exceptions, massive bailouts, laws rigged to favor government-controlled industries, restrictions on resource development, and a vast poppy field of subsidies and penalties. The Democrats have added thousands of pages of fabulously expensive legislation since Obama took office. Two messages echo through those pages: Obey and be rewarded. Resist and be punished.

Who are the President and his congressional allies, to lecture us on what products to buy, or investments to make? Who are they to demand even more of our wealth to fund their next round of grand designs? Their failure is obvious and complete. I don’t believe any group of brilliant central planners can legislate prosperity… but if such a group exists, it sure as hell isn’t this bunch.

It’s not surprising that command economies are weak. Business is a thing to be pursued and won. Control is a thing to be feared and avoided. A pile of stimulus dollars, dangled on the end of a string, is not a revenue stream.

Tam takes a longer view.

Imagine for a moment that you are sitting down with a group of average Americans from, say, the first decade of the 20th Century. And you try and tell them that, within the lifetime of their grandchildren and great-grandchildren, the federal government would regulate by fiat everything from the size of their toilet tanks to the chemical composition of the paint on their child's bicycle. The ones that didn't think you were joshing would laugh you out of the room.

As the Silicon Graybeard said in a recent post:

We are strangling in a bureaucracy with a Code of Federal Regulations that has grown like a bacterial culture. A nation that was founded by a constitution that fills about 14 printed pages in today's technologies, passes financial reform bills that go over 2000 pages, health care bills that go almost 3000 pages, and more. Each bill creates hundreds of new regulations, which are so poorly written they have to be refined by hundreds of court cases.

Yeah...

And how well can our "betters" spend our money?

Well In LA they spend $111 million to "save or create" 54.5 jobs. Do I even have to do the math?

It'd be cheaper and more effective to just drive around throwing sacks of cash out of the back of trucks. But it's not about the money, it's about a dangly carrot and the stick for those of you that don't get with the program.