Endless scandals and screwups: Simply the result of too much Big Government?

[deltex1]

It's simply a case of a pea brained president with no clue of how to do his job.

 

[Ibentoken]

Incompetence.

 

[candycorn]

Liberals have been telling us for decades (or longer) that government is the best instrument for providing "social justice", righting wrongs, and making up for deficiencies. Since those things abound in any human society, their response it to constantly grow government, assign it to clear up problems here, regulate there, and restrict in another place. In this way, we will wind up with a better society.

Yet now we have had an opportunity to examine closely how that is working out. And it's not a pretty sight. Three different groups in our government have flatly messed up recently - and it's the liberals themselves who tell us that this is so. The acting chief of the IRS said flatly that "We are doing horrible customer service here."

It is NOT a result of leaders who have done the wrong thing, guided government the wrong way. In every case, the leftists themselves tell us, the leader of the particular section, had nothing to do with it. It was NOT the result of the policy for that section. Every time, it is low-level underlings who have screwed up, who have done something other than what their managers intended.

And this should not be a surprise to us, those same liberals tell us. One of President Obama's senior advisers, came out and said flatly that there is no way the President could have been aware of the various things that were going wrong. "You know, we have a large government. Part of being president is there’s so much beneath you, that you can’t know because the government is so vast.", he said.

Time and again, the reasons why things have gone wrong, is because managers could not know what was going on in their own departments. The acting Chief of the IRS said that he knew nothing about what his agency was doing while targeting conservatives - he only found out through news reports. Even the President has said more than once that he knew nothing about various events until he saw the news.

Are we beginning to see what the the most basic problem is, in large central government? It is made of nothing but offices staffed by ordinary people, with no particular expertise in doing what they are doing. The people who did so much wrong in the IRS, were not top-flight accountants - they were basically low-level bureaucrats. Those who dropped the ball in Benghazi, were not our top diplomats or politicians, they were underlings who did not pass on messages or made a bad decision on whether to dispatch a rescue mission that was ready and waiting. The top guy at Justice did not sign off on the warrant to seize AP phone records, it was someone lower, who obviously goofed and violated the reporters' 1st amendment rights - something the top guy would never have done.

Liberals from the President on down are telling us straight out, that the problem is that government is too big. And that's why so much is going wrong: It is impossible, they tell us, to control all those people in all those offices.

Conservatives have been saying this for years, of course, if not for generations. But now that the big-government advocates themselves are finally agreeing... shouldn't we start listening? And doing something about it?

It's time to start cutting back on government. For the simple reason that growing government is creating more problems than it is solving. EVERYONE involved, is telling us so. Is there anyone left, anywhere, who is not saying the same?

It is unanimous, at last. Time to get rid of Big Government. The very people who brought it to us, are now telling us that they cannot control it, and had nothing to do with the repeated screwups, violations of our rights, and even deaths that have resulted directly from the unweildy ponderousness of the government.

I'm convinced. Is there anyone left who isn't?

So, what do we do about it?

I think there is some truth to what you're saying.
However, supposedly conservative "grown ups" were in the oval from 68-76, 80-92, 2000-2008 during the last 46 years (28 years of the 46). Hard to blame only the liberals for this.

 

[Moonglow]

How many of you big mouths will be running for office next year?? I bet zero. But please, tell us how it is done...Oh please..

 

[Decus]

There is blame enough to go around. Government has become too big at the Federal level. Maybe it's time to look at the Tenth Amendment for a way forward. Just one more shameful example where countless sums have been lost over time:

"...Native American Rights Fund, called it “yet another serious and continuing breach in a long history of dishonorable treatment of Indian tribes and individual Indians by the United States government.”"

Arizona Senator John McCain, the chairman of the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs, bluntly called it “theft from Indian people.”

Billions Missing From U.S. Indian Trust Fund | On First Nation Issues, Events, And Environmental Issues On The West Coast And World Events.

.

 

[Decus]

Did I mention the Tenth Amendment? Here is something to ponder:

"A new government report on duplication and fragmentation in federal programs can read like a book of "screw-in-a-light-bulb" jokes."

"The report, by the non-partisan Government Accountability Office, identifies 26 new areas where federal government programs are fragmented, duplicative, overlapping or just inefficient. Add that to the 162 areas identified in past reports, and Congress has a road map for saving tens of billions of dollars a year."

Government often has 10 agencies doing one job

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[g5000]

Some people would like to pretend that influence peddling and lobbyists are at the heart of our problems which is bull. The fact is that our bloated bureaucracy has become inefficient and government feels that it does not have to account for its actions and this is our most pressing problem.

If the central government was not given the power, then a bureacracy would not be built up around that power.

You my want to read the 10th Amendment of the US Constitution (part of the Bill of Rights): "powers not granted to the federal government by the Constitution, nor prohibited to the States, are reserved to the States or the people."

The central government was not given the power it encroached upon it.

Thus my post about federal preemption and Senators no longer being elected by state legislatures. These are the means by which the federal government stole power from the states. See, I am implying the solution to the problem besides just bellyaching about it.

 

[g5000]

Did I mention the Tenth Amendment? Here is something to ponder:

"A new government report on duplication and fragmentation in federal programs can read like a book of "screw-in-a-light-bulb" jokes."

"The report, by the non-partisan Government Accountability Office, identifies 26 new areas where federal government programs are fragmented, duplicative, overlapping or just inefficient. Add that to the 162 areas identified in past reports, and Congress has a road map for saving tens of billions of dollars a year."

Government often has 10 agencies doing one job

.

Due to the number of overlapping duties of regulatory agencies, corporations are able to shop around for the laxest regulator. And since the bureaucrats in each agency want to keep their jobs, there is a rush to the bottom to be the laxest.

An industry needs to only capture one federal regulator instead of 50 state regulators. For instance, when states began going after credit card companies for fraudulent practices, the federal OCC exercised its federal preemption to shut down those states from prosecuting. Then the OCC did nothing against those companies.

See how that works?

 

[Decus]

The "lighter" side of big government:

Top 10 Examples of Government Waste in 2013

 

[Decus]

10th Amendment, what do you think?

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[Quantum Windbag]

The state legislatures would then be doing their own preemption.

So let's come up with a better solution.

Get rid of government, period. We would be better off.

No government at all? So you disagree with the Constitution and the principles of our country.

No, I disagree with government.

 

[C_Clayton_Jones]

Endless scandals and screwups: Simply the result of too much Big Government?

No, it's the result of a dangerously hyper-partisan government and the 24/7 news cycle.

The fact is there’s no such thing as ‘big government’ (or ‘small government,’ for that matter), where considering the challenge and complexity of administering to 300,000,000 people in the world’s most advanced and only superpower, ‘the government’ gets it right most of the time, and what doesn’t go right needs to be put in its proper – non-partisan – perspective.

 

[MACAULAY]

The Original Post might be the best I have read on this board. It is the first to have a chance to change minds.