The Purpose of Government

Such events in the recent news. Turns out, John Edwards has admitted he fathered his mistress's baby. Wow! What a shock! (Hear the sarcasm in my text?) I mean, who would have thought? Next thing you know, Mark McGuire will be admitting he used steroids!

Oh, yeah, right.

But now Massachusetts has voted for a Republican to go to the U.S. Senate. No, wait, let me rephrase that. The people of Mass. have decided that they would rather vote for Charles Manson than send Barbara Coakley to the U.S. Senate. And so, horrors, a Republican is going to represent the bluest of states. Mr. Brown is going to Washington.

That's what you get when you try to run a dark campaign, and take voters for granted. Apparently, in Massachusetts, you can win an election even if you are a terminal alchoholic, a cocaine abuser, and a murderer of Mary Jo Kopechne, but damn it, don't you dare try to mail it in! That sin is just too great!

I suppose that's the situation that has made me ponder our current state of affairs on Capital Hill. I've blogged before about the insanity of partisanship making it impossible to get a moderate elected. Perhaps Mr. Brown will be more Purple than Red. But why is it that Republicans have decided that everything Barack Obama tries to do must be opposed, no matter what? Why are they continually opposing what is essentially now a Republican-themed health care reform bill? Why?

It can only be that they're afraid of Obama being skilled enough to build a legacy that will essentially render the Republican party a minority for decades. He's FDR and JFK rolled into the dream of MLK, and if he succeeds, they're out for a very, very long time. So they're determined to stop him at all costs. Including, and especially, the well being of our country.

Sorry, but I don't think that our entire nation needs to be sacrificed just to stop the Obama juggernaut.

You see, what ADULTS do, is find some middle ground. They find ways to compromise to get something, anything, done. But these overgrown babies are so blinded by their Polish thinking (see my previous blog post on being Polish) that they're willing to throw the American Dream into the gears of the machine just to make it grind to a halt. What unbelievably juvenile bullshit!

Yes, people are pissed off about what they perceive as the socialization of health care. Let's understand that this "health care" bill is about as socialist as Joe McCarthy and the John Birch Society! But even if it weren't, what's the point of this "Tea Party" phenomenon, if not a misunderstanding of the purpose of government? Or rather, The Purpose of Government (capitalized).

You see, The Purpose of Government is, at its most basic, the protection of its citizens. That's it. All other reasons for government's existence all boil down to that one. We protect our citizens from crime, so we establish laws, courts, police, and so forth. We protect our citizens from foreign invasion, and so we have a military. We protect our citizens from fire, from flood, from natural disasters. It is this protection which is the very purpose of why we bother putting up with a government at all.

So, by definition, a government must protect us from viruses, from bacteria, from injury and illness. It therefore must pay for health care. It is not optional! And if a government does not bother to protect us from sickness and disease, then it has failed us in The Purpose of Government. Our response must be to revolt, and put into place a government that will ensure health care is available!

We've seen a revolt. But, amazingly, the revolt is to prevent health care from being provided! This is the "Tea Party."

Of all the bass-ackward, upside-down, inside-out, turned-around fucking bullshit of public stupidity! Just what does it take to get people to understand that by fighting for health care, we're just trying to get government to do its damned job?!

Okay, Thomas Jefferson famously said: "That government is best, which governs least." And at the time he said it, it was very much true. As a person with libertarian leanings, or as my friend Charlotte put it, a "progressive libertarian" (I like that!), I want government out of our lives as much as possible. But we have reached a modern technological age where we have no choice but to turn to big government for certain things. Why? Because there are other forces out there with big money and big special interests who would run over us rampant if a big government wasn't there to protect us from them. Again, that's part of The Purpose of Government.

Big government is needed to counter the big interests of Exxon-Mobil, of BP, of Royal Dutch Shell. It needs to balance out Wal-Mart, Target, Walgreens and Sears/K-Mart. It needs to be the one thing feared by Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson, and Glaxo Smith Kline. It needs to be bigger than McDonalds, Coka-Cola, or Pepsico. If Big Government weren't there, these giants would inadvertently crush us, much like Gulliver crushing the Lilliputians in some Dickens novel.

So the days of small government are, sadly, over. Thomas Jefferson, were he alive today, would concede that. And Tea Partiers who lobby for smaller government are just plain living in an 1800's dream world.

But we can still lobby to get Big Government out of our personal lives. We can tell Uncle Sam to quit telling people which God to pray to. We can tell government to quit telling consenting adults that they can't get married because they're the same gender. We can tell government to quit forcing fake science into our classrooms. We can tell them to not wiretap us, and that we don't care what excuse of fighting terrorism they use. We can tell them to stop outlawing harmless recreational drugs.

In short, we can tell them to finally give us FREEDOM! Isn't America supposed to be about freedom?

Stick that in your teabag!

Eric