The False Promise of Big Government by Patrick M. Garry

Author:Patrick M. Garry
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781497697362
Publisher: Intercollegiate Studies Institute
Published: 2017-09-25T04:00:00+00:00

Point #4

BIG GOVERNMENT BECOMES ITS OWN END

The advocates for big government often take a simplistic approach to social problems. Since any problem can be solved by a government program, then a new or expanded government program is itself a sign that the problem has been addressed.

Government, then, stops being a means for addressing social problems and becomes an end in itself. Under this approach, all focus goes to the government—e.g., how much money government is spending, or how big the scope of its programs is.

Lost in all this is the problem itself. Rarely is there an analysis of whether government is actually helping anyone other than the bureaucrats it employs. Nor is there any analysis of whether the burden government places on other people—through taxes and regulations—is overcome by the actual benefits it is delivering to those who may really need them.

GOVERNMENT SIZE BECOMES THE PROXY FOR ANY SOCIAL REMEDY

Once government has grown large enough to possess its own power base, its primary aim is to perpetuate itself. Bureaucrats become a class bent on serving their own interests.

Take the Veterans Health Administration scandal that exploded in 2014. This federal agency, part of the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), is charged with providing medical care to those who have served our country in the armed services. It turned out that VA hospitals were making military veterans wait for service well beyond the targeted fourteen-day period. Some veterans died while on the waiting list, and some hospitals falsified records to make it look like they were meeting their targets. The VA system paid out $200 million in wrongful-death settlements over a decade. Instead of being disciplined for mismanagement, VA officials received generous bonuses.

The scandal demonstrated how the VA employees themselves—not our nation’s veterans—became the agency’s most important constituency. And this constituency was committed to government perpetuation. The union representing VA employees gave 97 percent of its political donations at the national level and 100 percent at the state level to candidates committed to big government.

DID YOU KNOW?

In the first fifty years of the “War on Poverty,” the federal government spent triple what the United States had spent on all military wars since the American Revolution.

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