

© Stuart Carlson

Is turnabout fair play?

UPDATE: This post hit the front page of social news site Reddit, and some pretty ironic flaming is going on over there.

What I find amazingly ironic is that most of the arguments are over whether government is good or government is bad, like it could be purely one or the other. In a representative democracy, the government is us. We voted for these clowns. As Pogo famously said, we have met the enemy, and he is us.

Would you argue about whether the American people are good or bad? Obviously, some are good and some are bad (sometimes, the same people are both good and bad, occasionally at the same time). The same thing is true for government — some is good and some is bad. Which we get is up to us. As much as I love to bash Fox News, the problem is not Fox News, the problem is all the people who believe their bald-faced propaganda.

If you claim that government is purely bad, does that mean you want no government at all? No police, no fire department, no military, no laws, and all transactions done by barter? If you claim that government is purely good, does that mean you want government to do everything? Own all property, decide what you read? I’m sure there are nut-jobs at both ends of this spectrum, but most people understand that we need some government. The issue is not, for example, whether or not to have regulations at all, but what regulations actually work and what regulations don’t work.

The real message of Obama (as he frequently said himself) was that we shouldn’t trust him, that he can’t fix everything. If we want to have a good government, we have to be involved, we have to make sure the government works for us, not the other way around. When did we become a nation of victims, bleating on and on while not actually doing anything constructive?