Tuesday, May 09, 2006

State Inflated


How is it that the State, the repository of uselessness, ever became capable of being considered that vital, primal source of competence , the guarantor of all truths?In other words, what made it so popular?
Once upon a time, the state was confined to various caretaking functions, cleaning up after the real people of the real world, doing a few of the less important jobs that only a public surrogate could do.Protecting rights, ie property and physical safety, became the duty of this state, but not the prime entitlement.
The fact is, that the states which still exist must have done that job exceptionally well, ever to convince the general populace that they were capable of anything else.And a confidence trick of that size and scale could not have succeeded unless there was a general impression that the state was competent and trustworthy.
It was the success of the people who had licked the minimal government into shape which, honestly or not, led to the popular clamour for it to take over huge swathes of real life.
Today, people ask why there is no 'respect' in the young, or why most people seem to be crooked to some degree or other, there being a general disregard for authority.
This disregard is the bastard offshoot of the rejection of tyranny in the 70s and 80s, when it really was a force to be seen. Today people are dimly aware that it is backfiring, yet are still unsure of whether they can ever commit to the dictates of those who seek to stamp it out again.
What we are up against is inflation, nothing more or less; where once a handful of classicly educated adinistrators held the fate of nations in their remit, now we have thousands, millions of 'administrators', trying to adjust every wrongly identified 'problem' by grasping at people's balls, stomachs and liberty in order to achieve a status quo which is forever receding from them.
The harder they grasp at us, the more we break, and the more we break the more problems are identified.
In 1900, 2000 civil servants governed an India of 500 million people; today in England there are literally millions of civil servants for a tenth of the population.You cannot expand a 'gold standard' of universal quality that far without total destruction of the qualities that made the reputation in the first place.
Kids don't respect schoolteachers because they are instruments of repression and of woeful quality; more and more quality controls in them are demanded by a government desperate to shore up the dream, and even as paper money drops in value while becoming harder and harder to forge, the regulated legions of the stupid achieve less and less.
The socialist dream is self-destroying, and it is now destroying itself.
We must be careful not to let it take us with it

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