Yuri Maltsov: There is no such thing as good big government.

At a Mises Institute event recently held in Naples Florida, Russian Yuri Maltsov discussed life under socialist Russia.  His point was pretty clear: there is no such thing as good big government.  Governments are socialist by nature and so the bigger the government you have, the more socialism you end up with.  His conclusion is that you cannot fix government so that big government actually works.  Thus, the only workable strategy to avoid government abuse is to keep it small.  In his experience, big government=socialism and socialism requires that government eventually engage in domestic internal terrorism against its own people.  The more its policies fail, the more it has to turn to fear and terror and propaganda in order to save face and to stay in power.  Big government eventually begins to view the common people as what Maltsov calls "public slaves".  People in this catagory are worse off than privately owned slaves because a private slave owner will take better care of his slave property than government will take of common people who do not serve the needs of government.  Some of the things he discusses as having happened in Russia and in Cuba under socialism are pretty graphic.

As I have written in the past, these things don't just happen, they evolve.  Government gets into trouble and so it has to "do something" to fix the problem.  The "fix" is invariably an attack of some sort on the people and, as Yuri makes it a point to say, the people are made to pay for the very attacks on themselves.  I see the TSA as a good modern day USA example of exactly this.  In fact, government hacks even publicly admit that crises are an opportunity to expand government.

Bottom line is that when people give over the management of their daily lives to someone else they can scarcely expect to receive the same treatment as if they retained control of their own lives.  This is why we cannot leave the solving of all problems to government.  This is why we cannot continue giving government unlimited funds to spend however they see fit and without any accountability.  We have no idea how government actually spends the cash they tax and borrow but given that there is no verified accounting we can only believe that there is massive fraud and abuse. 

Oh, I know, I know, that's all conspiracy talk best left to crazy people.  I hear it all the time.  However, in my view, brushing it off so lightly is the easy way out.  It's the path that allows the lazy part of our brains to prevail.  It's much more difficult to come to grips with the fact that government even admits that trillions go missing without any accountability.  Ignore the facts if you like but the facts show that big government is corrupt by nature.  A big problem that we will have to deal with in the not too distant future is that government debt is actually going to be the cause of major problems which the government will then claim to be the solution provider for.  They are actually creating the big crisis which they will be very careful not to "waste" in their ongoing efforts to create bigger, more powerful government.  You know you are being conned when the fox who has been guarding the hen house steps forward (pushing all others out of the way no less) to solve the the problem of chickens which mysteriously go missing.  It's going to happen.  The only question is what are you yourself going to do about it.