Government fixes
Ever notice how everything the federal government has set out to “fix” has only made things catastrophically worse? Remember how the government was going to make housing more affordable with the 1997 federal law “designed to encourage commercial banks and savings associations to help meet the needs of borrowers in all segments of their communities, including low- and moderateincome neighborhoods” according to its authors? Since its inception, we have seen cyclical booms and busts most recently culminating in the 2008 market crash. Houses today are less affordable than they have ever been. How about our “fixed” banking? A combination of byzantine over-regulation, federal government-created-and-fueled inflation, and massive federal subsidization of markets has led to cascading bailouts that further fuel inflation while perpetuating an ever-expanding moral hazard ultimately consolidating risk and wealth within an oligarchy of government-friendly megabanks.
You can go down the line, Obamacare “fixing” healthcare has made healthcare less affordable. How about Vietnam, Iraq, Libya, Iraq, and Afghanistan, pretty fixed up these days wouldn’t you say? Trust me, as someone — in contrast to our D.C. overlord fixers — who has spent some time at the pointy end of an interventionist foreign policy (most recently in Kabul/New Saigon), fixed was not the word I would use to describe those places. Student loans and universities? Both more expensive than at any other time in American history. How about those COVID and infrastructure fixes that cost us trillions of tax dollars and have yet to show any signs of actually helping solve those problems? Maybe there’s a reason the central purpose of the framing of the U.S. Constitution was to limit federal powers and empower local and state government within the Republic?
When looked at as a whole, our current oversized, fiatcurrency gorged, unaccountable federal government saving us from ourselves reminds me most of Team America leaving Paris in flames from undisciplined ordnance discharges at a few terrorists as they hop on their choppers, and Joe yells to the stunned Parisians, “Bonjour, everyone. Don’t worry, everything is “bon.” Bon indeed.
— Nick McNulty Windham
NH