How our current government works.
Bills in Washington are very often put forth to help children, the poor, or some unfortunate group. The thing is though, if you take a look at Washington it is filled with hundreds of lobbyist groups that petition Congress to help the industry they represent. These groups are there for the sole purpose to influence (Buy) Congressmen and Senators, even at times writing the bills for our representatives. But out of all these lobbyist groups, there are not any that represent the children or the poor. So to believe anything coming out of Washington is for the children or the poor is at best naive.
What comes from passing a bill that is meant help someone? First, a committee is setup to decide how best to run the new program. This leads to a branch of offices being setup for that program, each of these needing to be staffed. Then usually a research period is started to refine the program. Around this time one of the lobbyist groups that helped create the bill now offers their services to help the program succeed.
Now the industry (Special Interest) of the lobbyist group which wrote the bill has guaranteed work without having to do research, advertising, building a base of customers, or even determining if the program will actually work. The beauty part of this whole cycle is the people that actually determine whether a program is working, are the committees and office workers that came into existence with the program. So no matter what, the program is an overwhelming success and to be even better next year, all they need is more money.
In a free market, the industry that created the bill would have had to actually sell people on the program or service, and on top of that take a chance it would fail, and lose their entire investment. Instead they can invest money into Congressmen and force the American public to buy their product or service whether we need it or not.
This is nothing new to the world, it was done to the colonist when companies like the East India Trading Company petitioned the crown to force the colonists to buy things indirectly through taxes.
This is directly why the Constitution limits exactly what Congress can spend money on. It is not entirely the lobbyists who corrupt the system, they are merely a symptom of the problem. The problem is that Congress is being allowed to ignore our Constitution and spend the people's money outside the agreement between the people and government. We must remind government it is not their money to spend.
More centralized government does not create equality, instead it transfers inequality from choices and decision made by individuals in the free market to whether you are politically well connected or not. As long as decisions are made in Washington of who wins or who loses, the lobbyists will always exist to make sure they are not the losers.
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Carl Bunce for Congress
www.carlbunce.com
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Exactly.
Government should be twenty or so people in a local school cafeteria or a library or a community building hashing out what they need or don't need in their community.
What the heck happened to our ideals?