Remove favoritism from government policies, your purchases should determine your favorites not the government. You may end up making a bad purchase from time to time but it is not the government’s job to protect you from yourself and your poor purchases, we all need opportunities to learn from our mistakes. However, I think we all would like the government’s help in preventing fraudulent activities again us. Will the government or anybody be able to protect us from all fraud, no and that is not the standard we should set. Should known (properly adjudicated with due process) fraudsters be identified so you are forewarned, absolutely while providing them with a way for them to earn their way back into everyone’s good graces.
Everyday we hear about bad or uncomfortable things happening to people in our country and the world but that does not mean that we should empower the government to try and stop all of these things from happening. For too long we have requested that the government take care of or try to fix every perceived wrong we see or hear about on the news or in the Internet. Asking a third party to take care of something that you feel should be corrected is separating you from the problem and the opportunity for you to help your fellow man, woman, or child in your neighborhood, country, or world. If you feel that it is an issue than you need to take some action to make it better without imposing your will and sense of right over someone else. We are here to help one another, give with all our love, not to tell others how to live their life.
We started giving away our individual power to the government when we started looking to the government to take care of issues that we use to informally take care of in our own communities. Some politicians that crave the power that we give them by electing them to public office took advantage of our natural tendency to not want to get involved and let someone else handle what we saw around us that made us uncomfortable. Those politicians saw this as an opportunity to start telling folks not to worry about it just continue electing me and giving me more of your money and I’ll take care of the problem for you. Better yet I’ll take care of this issue that you are concerned about by using someone else’s money (the rich or from a presumed rich area of the country) which all converts to time in this economy.
This has lead to what I call a victim mentality where some of us no longer think that we are capable of making good choices with our time which leads to money, most of us trade time for money in this economy. We might have thought that electing a politician that will take care of this problem for us was going to save us time when it is actually taking more time away from us by spending more money on the problem then if we took care of it ourselves.
Once it becomes a government problem now we have to craft a policy about this problem and what is the right solution for the problem then we have to hire government professionals to monitor the problem and the programs we are paying others to take care of the problem for us. Sometimes we are not even told how much the problem will really cost to solve, we are not paying for all of it with our taxes, we are also borrowing so our children and now their children are going to be paying for our wanting to avoid getting involved with our fellow humans here on earth.
I am not saying that government professionals are bad employees, some are but most are not and some are extremely talented and dedicated to their jobs in the government. But should we be asking the government and these government professionals to solve issues that we are really concerned about instead of allowing individuals to work together to solve them. How do we determine that this issue is really a nationwide problem that we need to solve or just a nice to have item that someone has not earned the right to yet.
For example everyone really likes some of the benefits that Veterans have earned, the two most popular are education benefits and zero down home loans. These programs are still available to Veterans who have earned them but other citizens that had no desire to serve in the military also wanted similar benefits without making the sacrifices that military service requires, so over the years our political leaders have been promising those benefits, at some level, to all citizens. This again creates more demand for these services and pushes the prices up for all housing and higher education, plus since we are not paying for these services with funds raised in the year spent our government has had to take out more and more loans to pay for these unearned benefits.