When government becomes the most important employer it is time to reassess its purpose. “On the reservation government jobs are the only jobs available,” A Cheyenne River Sioux elder said. Since forced relocation, when the white man discovered gold on Indian lands, reservations have symbolized the demise of a traditional way of life for Native Americans. The dole, welfare, unhealthy diet, unemployment, boredom, feelings of unworthiness that lead to temptations and substance abuse destroyed their culture.
It is on tribal reservations where the focus of societal ills created sophisticated prisons for once proud, independent, diligent, healthy and industrious indigenous people. Obesity is prevalent and with it diseases unknown to Native peoples before the white man came. Substance abuse and alcoholism takes a toll of young people both on the highways and in degradation of health.
“The government of Canada wanted me to go into a village in the North,” Don Cardinal said. He is a Cree traditional healer and respected spiritual advisor. “No government program was working. The people were all sniffing gasoline. From the little ones of eight right up to eighty-year old grandmothers. They rolled cotton balls, dipped them in gasoline and put them in their nostrils. Went around high all day. Of course it destroyed their health.”
Within a month Don was able, through traditional practices in sweat lodges and by renewal of spirituality, deflect substance abuse among 70% of the village population. He was under no illusions that once he left that the people in this remote northern village would go back to sniffing gasoline or glue to relieve the malaise of their lives.
Robbed of tradition, destroyed by subjugation on reservations, transported to boarding schools, deprived of their language and culture, fed unwholesome provisions and treated worse than black slaves in the south, Native Americans epitomize faults caused by big government. Slaves were considered valuable chattlels bought for a high price by the same evil whites that wanted the Indians eradicated, considering them worthless. They occupied valuable lands the whites wanted.
All of this in the name of government. On a plainer level government invades every aspect of life in America. It has become so big, so intrusive, so much of a policeman that there is no aspect of the U.S. Constitution that has not been eroded or is presently under attack.
Individual freedoms are not the only cost. Big government taxes, wastes the money, then evades blame. It is a clever ploy really. Only elected members of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives can impose federal tax burdens on citizens. Only an elected President can propose a budget that then goes to Congress to pass. Only elected state representatives and state senators can do the same with state taxes and only an elected governor can propose and budget. No one appointed by elected officials is otherwise responsible for anything other than collecting the levies elected officials impose.
A veteran journalist for the Orlando Sentinel recently penned his last column. It was a diatribe about taxes and taxation, essentially about big government. He places blame squarely upon the shoulders of 545 elected officials in the Senate and House and nowhere else. Charley Reese printed a list of 46 direct taxes citizens suffer every day that government imposes to sate its exploding work force.
In the U.S. there is outsourcing of jobs to India, outsourcing manufacturing to China, and insourcing labor to illegal immigrants that cross porous borders to fill jobs that otherwise would have been done by citizens. It can be said that U.S. citizens have become lazy, slothful, incompetent and reliant on benefits and entitlements doled out by government. It can’t last. It won’t last. No nation can survive for long in an economy based on allowing big government to control life. Economic, moral and thought.
We have long assumed that a free press would protect us from government excesses. The White House Press Corps is insidious to any notion of a free press. They are puppets whose strings are pulled and controlled with access. Any reporter that wants a story is beholding to the President’s puppy. Access, indeed presence at the White House itself, can be revoked, denied and cut off entirely. Each and every reporter knows it. Getting into the White House press corps is a plum. As soon as a reporter steps onto Air Force One, the glamour of the job overtakes the need to objectively investigate the news and report it accurately.
Investigative reporting is a luxury struggling newspapers have tabled. They use wire services, cut back on staff and fight unions in their print shops. Some have turned to electronic editions to fulfill requirements of increasing circulation. Most newspapers have retrenched in the light of fading advertising revenues. Investigative reporting is expensive. A reporter or two, a photographer perhaps, must be taken off the charts and given freedom to investigate a matter free of interference. In the case of government, bureaucrats are paid to obfuscate, deny, cover up and put pressure on media to discourage truth getting out.
Here is one little example. I wrote an article about a manatee that had been hit by a boat propeller in the Intracoastal Waterway north of the Boynton Beach Marina. It was a story about caring citizens that called and called and called various government agencies to get help. These good Samaritans waded into the water, stood on a condo dock and tried to wave careless boaters away. The manatee was a female accompanied by two pups.
When the story hit the Internet a flak person from the Florida Wildlife Commission (FWC) immediately wrote the paper that this was old news. The communication stated that the FWC responded and found it was not a serious injury. Indeed many hours later, once dozens of calls had been made by concerned citizens, someone did respond. They did climb aboard a Sheriff’s patrol boat and look. Nothing was done. The situation was proclaimed not serious. The photograph of the manatee showed a deep, oozing and bleeding gash.
The citizens watching were outraged. First because they couldn’t reach anyone at the FWC, then because they were being cursed at by boaters not interested in slowing down or driving around the manatee, then by inaction by those paid to do something to protect manatees, one of the most endangered species on Earth.
I wrote Governor Rick Scott. Why pay people to read newspapers and scan media outlets to respond in a Watergate-like to protect from faint criticism. Governor Scott’s office referred my letter back to the FWC. The chief flak person in community affairs, another salaried, sick-leave, vacation and benefit laden government official, wrote me that they appreciate the concern. What was said was, if the baloney of the bureaucrat’s governmentese response is removed, is that FWC checks media so they look good. The letter wasn’t that blatant but that was the upshot of the deal.
Meanwhile Florida’s State House and Senate are coping with budget deficits while government bureaucracies fill jobs with flak people to fend off criticism. Criticism brings focus on actual waste in government. Waste in today’s times of taxpayer money, squeezed from the last remnants of America’s middle class, cannot be tolerated.
Don’t blame the bureaucrats in government. Put the blame exactly where Charley Reese of the Orlando Sentinel said it belongs: on elected officials. If government is too big, Unelect those that make it so.
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Note: The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and are not necessarily representative of Epoch Times.