Don’t blame politicians; you’re to blame for growth of government

By David McElroy · November 6, 2017

Do you want to know where bad public policy comes from? Do you want to know why governments keep getting bigger and bigger, despite you wanting smaller government? Here’s how it happens:

1) People consume “news” from media sources which give them no useful context and which lead them to believe scary narratives.

2) People feel intense grief and anger at the negative facts which support the narratives they have been led to believe.

3) Those people then selectively choose which facts to believe and which to ignore — based on the narratives they have been given.

4) Those people increasingly feel a strong emotional desire to “fix things,” because they’re scared and angry and hurt.

5) Politicians offer them simple-minded solutions which accept the negative narratives as obvious truth.

6) People who originally had firm and principled reasons to oppose government power grabs relent — “just in this case” — because they have been taught the latest new law or program is the only reasonable solution. (“Nobody could oppose this.”)

7) Politicians pass these bad policies and pat themselves on the back.

8) When the policies don’t work, the same politicians say it’s because we didn’t take action that was draconian enough, so they double down on a bad idea.

9) People who supported the previous bad policies — and who still want the problem solved — can’t admit they made an error before, so they agree.

10) Things get worse — and the cycle continues.

You started out knowing that government didn’t have the solutions. You knew that individual freedom was both moral and pragmatic. But you allowed yourself to eventually agree to things you never thought you would have agreed to.

You agreed to let politicians steal some individual income — “just a tiny percentage” or “just from the rich” — and then that theft grew more and more.

You agreed to let politicians dictate your health system. At first it was just to help the poor. Then it was to bring costs down. Before you knew it, their failed policies had destroyed your health care system. In exhaustion, you now agree to let them take over everything. (I’ve heard so-called conservative lately who favor “single payer” health care, because they’re so frustrated and can’t see where the problems originated.)

You agreed to let politicians control who gets guns. Who could argue with keeping guns away from criminals? And then they come back for more and more restrictions. Then they tell you the only solution is for them to have all the guns.

You agreed to let politicians control more and more small pieces of your life — and those small pieces always grow into huge things. By the time they’ve become monstrous evil, it’s too late to stop them.

And on and on and on.

Politicians aren’t to blame for this. You are.

You support a system which gives them the power to dictate to you — and to everybody else. You worship that system. You teach your children that it’s holy and must be obeyed.

You then fail to take the simple steps you need to take to understand what’s going on. Before you know it, you believe monstrous lies — simply because you went along with the narratives that media and politicians gave you.

The people telling you the lies already believe the lies. They don’t even know they’re lying. They have abdicated the responsibility of thinking for themselves, so they’ve accepted intellectually bankrupt solutions and morally bankrupt ideas.

Don’t blame the politicians. Don’t blame the media. Don’t blame anybody but yourself if you have come to accept any of this — because if you accept any coercive government, you have accepted the moral foundation for all of it.

If you ever hope to be free — to get rid of the overlords who control you — it’s your responsibility to free your own mind first.

It’s your responsibility to think for yourself.

It’s your responsibility to quit taking the easy way based on emotions such as fear, greed and envy.

You have to decide that you’re an individual whose brain isn’t going to be shaped by lies and fears. Only you can do that for yourself. Nobody else.

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If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

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