The Bear Hug

Excuse me while I pick myself up off the floor. That was a close one! I might have been seriously injured. The reason for my uncontrolled fall was the fit of hysterical laughter I had when reading the lead article in yesterday's paper, the subject being, of course, the economy. (Election? What election?) Here's the quote that put me in danger of an emergency room visit: “The joint ownership [of banks] is expected to be temporary, perhaps three to five years...” Right. Sure. The Mall in Washington, DC is lined, over its entire length, by massive buildings housing “temporary” agencies, most of which date from the 1930s. Their job was to administer “emergency” programs – kind of like the one the government is taking on now. When I first moved to the DC area, there was an old, wooden, barracks-like building sitting right _on_ the Mall, called "Tempo A", that the Army had built during World War II (probably to provide relief for the already-overcrowded Pentagon). The place was an eyesore, but I kind of liked it -- it had that WWII "vibe", like victory gardens and butter rationing, and the people who worked there could actually open their windows, unlike the denizens of all those hermetically-sealed tombs that house the bulk of the Washington bureaucracy.

But in any case, what people still fail to understand is that government is like a tropical disease, or a malignant tumor – once it has a foothold, it never goes away, and in fact will keep getting bigger, along with its mission, and there is apparently no power on earth big enough to stop it. I'll bet there are any number of government agencies and programs that are so totally obsolete, so woefully useless or redundant, that almost any Congressman (even) would agree that they really ought to be put out of their misery. But is it ever done? No. And this is for the same reason that lobbies, and special interest groups, always get their way despite not being in the best interests of the taxpayer. There is something about the focused effort of a group, or gang, with a mission that is irresistible to an elected official... something about the winning combination of pleas, threats, bribes, and plain persistence that eventually leads even the most skeptical among them (ERP – Except Ron Paul. I'm going to start using that abbreviation from now on to save keystrokes) to sign on the dotted line at the bottom of the document innocently titled, “A Bill”. So no, mere obsolescence won't do it, and neither will the fact of an agency or program's being wasteful, annoying, or a laughingstock. (Can you say “HUD”?) Because said agency is staffed with – what else? -- people, and remember what I said about every government program being a jobs program. And the programs in question, as inane as they may be, always benefit someone, i.e. they are not a total loss. And that someone, for some reason, has a better chance of gaining the ear of a Congressman than do all his other constituents.

Plus, you have the power factor, and now imagine that Congress, which has been feeling pretty helpless of late (e.g., they sit around dithering while George Bush singlehandedly, and without advice or consent, pursues an insane foreign policy and disastrous wars), all of a sudden have a chance to teach those damn greedy “capitalists” (which they very surely are not) up in New Yawk City a lesson. So what the writer of the article described as “engagement” with business really amounts to a takeover. He admits that “it's a move toward socialism”, but contends that “it's far short of nationalization”. Well, how far, I'd like to know? The financial sector will, from this day forward, be micromanaged by the government in a similar manner to the way they've been micromanaging the agricultural sector since the New Deal, with comparable results, I expect. (But don't expect any “money surpluses” to be sent overseas labeled, “From the people of the United States of America.” I mean – don't expect any more than we already send.) I imagine what might happen is that government will eventually loosen its grip a bit and give some of these outfits a bit of autonomy – you know, like the Postal Service, and like the kind Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac had for a while. But believe me, the chicks will go running back under the mother hen at the first sign of trouble; the “addiction to government”, i.e. to socialism, will never go away, since there's no known cure this side of the grave.

Plus, get this – the people being hired to “oversee” the process are the same ones who created the crisis to begin with. Sort of like hiring inmates to design jails; where do we put the jacuzzi? So, in this mother of all scams, those who started out fat and happy get to stay that way, and the rest of us get to see what life was like in East Germany (except with fewer string quartets). The good news, perhaps, is that interest in spiritual matters tends to go up under conditions of material impoverishment. Maybe a revival of sorts is in the making for this country, and it can't be too soon. That would make the whole affair worth it, in my opinion.