Back on Jan 7, Katharine Gregg wrote an Op-Ed in the Concord Monitor that showed that she has definitely forgotten how trust works. That it takes a long time to build up trust and it has to be consistent in order to maintain it.
What Trust? She wants us to “try to trust government again.” Yeah, sure thing, ma’am. Coming right up, ma’am. Just after I forget that its folks like your husband that put us $20 trillion in the hole and have made our kids and grandkids and great-grandkids indentured servants IF it is even mathematically possible for “the richest country in history” to pay off that debt.
A short fisking:
My Turn: We must rediscover trust in government By KATHARINE GREGG
We’ve just been through a revolution of a kind. Tired of the same old government whose members are more concerned with fighting among themselves than working for us, the citizens, a substantial portion of the voters has elected a unique kind of president. Now we’re all watching closely to see what he will do for us.
I’m as anxious as you, but I want to suggest what may seem like another revolution: that we try to trust government again. Not the dysfunctional government we have in Washington now, but Government with a capital “g,” that instrument that was created by and for us – We the People.
So, right off the bat, she wishes that we would blindly do what we ask. Sorry, not happening. It is clear, thanks to the disruptive force that is the Internet, that we all know a lot more how government works – and doesn’t work. We know who the good players and the bad ones are – those who are there to get something done and who are there just to be in front of the camera lenses. We also get to see how the sausage is made and see how the Crony Capitalism, favors, and pay-offs happen. DC has become a Leviathan that we Normals can’t control even if we send the right people (and what we’ve seen here in NH, the “good” go “DC Native” – most of the folks who make up the Government aren’t Trustworthy in carrying out their Constitutional promises (or worse, the Democrat / Socialists that get sent KEEP theirs and keep moving us away from our founding principles).
Consistency breeds Trust – and we haven’t seen the necessary Consistency on which to build that Trust
As far as Trump is concerned, what we have come to see is a two leveled President – his words and his tweets are at the top level only because that’s what everyone pays attention to. However, what I have been saying (and others are catching on) is that his accomplishments are FAR more Republican / Conservative than most of us wondered about – starting to zero in on Reagan type of achievements. Better, I would posit, than your husband did as an Exec Councilor, Governor, or US Rep and Senator.
We Americans, and especially we Granite Staters, pride ourselves on being rugged individualists with a penchant toward libertarianism. It dates back to Colonial times when parliament tried to impose a tea tax on us to support the British East India Company’s monopoly on tea sales to the Colonies.
However, even at the writing of the Constitution the Founding Fathers realized Government was necessary to maintain an the rights and freedom of citizensd to restrain groups of individuals from exploiting one another. They realized the role of Government is to ensure that all people have a chance at prosperity and fulfillment.
Note that “rugged individualists” – I’ll attend to that in a few moments.
As to maintaining the rights and freedom of citizens, she rings the bell – that is the primary and Proper Role of Government. After all, our founding Declaration lays it out quite well:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
And then she goes DEAD WRONG. Nowhere does it say anything the Proper Role of Government is to”restrain groups of individuals from exploiting one another.” Quite the opposite – it rails against GOVERNMENT from exploiting, terrorizing, and taking advantage of individuals. In this horrible mistake, she proceeds to parrot the Progressive line. Sure, Government should enforce contracts and the like as well as the choices we can make but as a Primary purpose? Only in the Progressive mind where Govt is in active control instead of standing back and just looking for “fouls.” And then she starts to list all of those Progressive activities (as Socialism’s ideas had crossed the pond and taken hold within not only academia but also with the Political Class that had a loose (if any) attachment to Constitutional ideas (RE: Woodrow Wilson, Teddy Roosevelt, et al.):
And for much of our history our government has performed this function. Beginning in the 19th century, the Interstate Commerce Act was the first to try to curb monopoly practices by railroads. The Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890 followed by the Clayton Antitrust Act of 1914 turned the government’s attention to curbing monopolistic practices by business. These acts leveled the playing fields so farmers and small businesses had a chance to compete without crippling disadvantage.
No, it hasn’t – while Constitutionally, the Fed Govt has nominal control over interstate commerce, she fails to tell that it originally was to keep the Various States from erecting tariffs and laws to slow commerce (Article I, Section 8, Clause 3: The clause states that the United States Congress shall have power “To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes.”). As we have seen, this has oft been bent way out of shape to grab power in all kinds of ways even to the point that a farmer was not allowed to grow wheat on his own farm for his own purposes because it MIGHT affect some economic activity that MIGHT be in/directly inter-state. The Supremes that cast their votes for this were a majority that was appointed by the second most Progressive (Progressive Totalitarian) socialist enamored with that vilest of European philosophies, which leads into her next point:
FDR’s social legislation – the Civilian Conservation Corps and the Works Progress Administration to create jobs, the National Industrial Recovery Act to establish fair-competition codes, the Federal Housing Administration to insure home loans, the Social Security Act to establish unemployment compensation and old age insurance – all of these were for We the People. Minimum wage was set, albeit at 40 cents an hour. Later, President Eisenhower authorized the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956 to construct the Interstate Highway System for safer, cheaper transportation. And in 1966 the national social insurance program called Medicare was established.
Right – she is enthralled with the idea that Government “gives us stuff” – no different than Hillary’s campaign ad where she is sitting next to a Christmas tree handing out “presents” to we the peons. That’s what Progressives do – all excited about the next Shiny Object that Government can or should “give” us – and nary a word about the soft cottony cocoon that slowly envelops us in dependence on Government handouts.
FDR’s term of office was the greatest expansion of the Federal Government in our history – and all of it was based on the Socialist / Administrative State desired by all Socialists and Progressives (the latter changed their name after that because they had damaged it so much PR wise). Sorry, Ms. Gregg, this is NOT the Government that we can or should trust. This was the largest expansion of Government telling individuals how they could live their lives, how their economic choices were curtailed.
She also got the purpose of the Interstate system wrong – that was a secondary purpose with the first part being that Eisenhower saw how the Germans had built their Autobahn system that was primarily to move military material around – more flexible than the railroads at the time and provided backup routing that railroads could not (e.g., the same principles that Darpa used for creating the Internet – again, it was NOT for civilian purposes at first but to provide for military communications and be able to route around damaged nexus points).
Social Security, Medicaid? These are actions that play against her “rugged individualists” claim – doing for oneself cannot be reconciled with praising Government for doing more and more. Often, the actions of Government then are at cross-purposes to what we would want to do for ourselves. I guess she has forgotten that there is always a price to be paid, another tax to be collected from we “rugged individualists” in order to “give stuff” to others. And in doing so, this is supposed to set the stage to “to trust government again“?
She continues to sound the cowbell of Government:
These are government actions we may or may not be aware of in our lives today, but there are many others we take for granted, though again their source may not be staring us in the face. The government has funded the lion’s share of research and development that goes into technologies we use and rely on every day: GPS, lithium-ion batteries, cellular technology, touch-screen and LED displays, Internet connectivity – technologies that people like Steve Jobs and his team have turned into iPhones. How could we conduct our lives without them? How could they have been developed without government-funded R&D?
Oh, we are so beholden to government – like the same one that allows voter fraud, spends us into oblivion, looks for Crony Capitalism, kills our veterans via our single payer / VA system from active denial of service, allow the IRS targets individuals simply because of political differences, puts entire agricultural regions (the Inland part of CA) simply because it support water for a 2 inch bait fish over people and food, wastes money on dumb projects (like the shrimp treadmill? Remember that, Katherine? How about this “Piss Christ” art project – we can denigrate the Christian faith but ISLAMOPHOBIA!). How about attacking our Second Amendment Right with the Progressive civilian disarmament Brigade or making Catholic nuns who minister to the poor and dying and forcing them to violate their Faith by forcing them to provide contraceptives and abortifacients against their Faith?
These are supposed to engender our Trust in Government?
In the past our government has funded Pell Grants for education, money toward roads, bridges, high-speed rail to make transportation safer and cheaper. But in recent years these funds have not been available to We the People because of the dysfunction that’s been strangling our government. What we have in Washington these days is not Government with a capital “g.” It’s partisan special interest taken to a monopoly degree. Of course we’re mad! But, please, in your understandable revolt, don’t disengage. Don’t tune out and drop out. We need one another more than ever despite what we may see as irreconcilable differences on certain positions.
You mean the Pell Grants that don’t often work? All that money in the Obama stimulus ($1 Trillion) that was supposed to already have fixed our infrastructure? And that taxpayer boondoggle known as Acela, or that mile deep hole in the ground known as the CA bullet train whose only purpose seems to be in generating higher and higher budget costs?
She also doesn’t mention, yet again, that “these funds” must first be taken from us before they can be “given” to us. In this, Ms. Gregg is sounding, more and more, like Hillary. Seriously, you want us to Trust Hillary????
What we have in common is bigger than what divides us. We want the monopoly of partisan special interest to stop. We want Government to be able to work for us again. We are told we are a wealthy nation, so let us unite to insist Government be permitted to let that wealth flow again – to R&D, to infrastructure, to education, to a minimum wage with dignity, to small businesses, to affordable health insurance, to good jobs for all.
“We are told we are a wealthy nation, so let us unite to insist Government ”
NO, NO, NO, NO, NO!! DEAD WRONG! Progressives say that in order to divert OUR wealth to Governmental purposes. WE, as individual Citizens may well be wealthy – certainly, we Americans are the 1% of the world’s population. Our Federal Government is BROKE – but for the sake of her Government cheerleading, she once again forgets about our $20T in debt – and sounding like Bernie Sanders, wants MORE of our money to give us “Free” stuff???
Unbelievable. This seals the deal for me – Ms. Gregg is a Progressive because she conflates the We with Government – something that our founders FOUGHT against. So we are to blithely allow Govt to take our wealth to do all kinds of things not enumerated in the Constitution? That is supposed to make us Trust government?
Trust in Government? She believes we are little children at Christmas looking forward to more presents – and don’t want us to realize that Santa stole our allowance money with which to buy them.
Hmm, maybe that’s how she sees us – that Government should “allow” us what it doesn’t need. Yeah, that sure would make me Trust again,
