Individual Drive?

Before my main thrust, I just want to know who cares, who really cares!, if that singer lip-synched the National Anthem at the Inauguration??????  C'mon, the government is spending millions of dollar it doesn't have every minute.  Kids are getting shot in every major city every day.  Politicans of both parties lie like hell to us, all in the name of knowing what's best for us better than we do.  Despite the deceptive reports, the unemployment/underemployment rate in this country is still near 20%.  Public education is a shambles, thanks to lousy teachers and administrators and, now, arrogant politicians who think they know what quality education is because, after all, we can run our schools like businesses.  And we're worried about some lip-synching and some college football player's online girlfriend....  Surely the Apocalypse is nearly upon us.

Yesterday, on my long drive to class, I wondered about what we've done and where we're headed.  Are we, I thought, losing our competitive drive, our individual initiative, replacing it with the "give me my free stuff [from the government] now?"  Hmmm....  It sure seems like it.

It's not just individuals' fault.  I think we have fostered such a change with our, sometimes well-meaning, but ultimately destructive policies.  In trying to help, we have done just the opposite.  We haven't really helped people by giving them things, for free, and we have harmed a lot of others in doing so.

I think Alexis de Tocqueville (reading him in History 11 42 years ago at Amherst, I never would have thought I'd be citing him now!) cautioned against this "softening" of our individual initiative, our competitive drive. 

Bureaucrats, Bureaucrats everywhere....  It seems like there are more and more regulations (you can read that as "laws") that are created merely to justify bureaucratic jobs.  How dampening of the spirit to find some pencil-neck writing regulations that kill a good idea!

Why should we take any initiative when the government will take care of us, in fact, will take care of everything?  Government gets bigger and bigger and the laws/rules/regulations get sillier and sillier (note a few months back my story of the rigamarole of picking up a new car). 

The auto companies, the banks, etc., we were told, were "too big to fail."  (Gee, why didn't that hold for the break-up of Standard Oil?  Wasn't that pretty big?  It didn't fail; in fact, it was quite efficient.  But it was destroyed anyway, by government.  Hmmm......)  Now, we expect government to make everything nice for us.  How silly!  Government has become too big to succeed.