After many years of thought, I have come to the conclusion that government is only good at two things; regulation and collecting money. I know some of you are thinking they’re really good at spending money too but I think they spend money poorly but boy do they know how to find more of it and how to extract it from even the most reluctant of us.
Government has figured out how to tax everything and when all that tax money proved to be insufficient for what they were spending it on, they invented user fees for things our taxes had already bought and paid for. They created fees for permits, licenses and the documents they require us to have and they have built a bureaucracy to control it all.
Canada’s GDP is estimated at $1.74 trillion annually. User fees, income and capital gains taxes alone take more than $299 billion out of the economy (source: Canada Revenue Agency and Stats Canada). Add to that consumption taxes which include the federal Goods and Services Tax, provincial sales taxes, excise taxes, school taxes, municipal property taxes, provincial income taxes and my particular favourite, the Welcome Tax in Quebec. (Home buyers pay what is referred to as a welcome tax on the purchase of a home as a way of making them feel welcome in their new community.
Overall, all levels of government combined take approximately 50% of the income earned by Canadians in the form of taxes or user fees and that, my friends, is greed at a level that would make the guys from Enron drool and Bernie Madoff positively slap his forehead and ask himself, “Why didn’t I think of that?”
They use that money to provide services, many of which we never hear of or see. Why? Because they turn the money over to the bureaucracy and the bureaucracy is quite simply a world of its own. In fact, I actually believe that government bureaucrats are the direct descendants of a race of aliens who came to earth eons ago after their home planet became so weighted down by red tape and regulation, it imploded.
I also believe that politicians are the descendants of the cross breeding between the ancestors of those bureaucrats from another planet and human beings.
They look like us. They walk like us but they don’t think, talk or live like us. They have no soul. That is how we know that they are not from around here. They are like ants living in a colony. They each have assigned tasks and go about those tasks like robots and because of that single-minded focus they now control everything.
Bureaucrats exist to regulate and control Politicians exist to spend money. That is their only purpose in life. They were bred by bureaucrats to feed the bureaucracy. Without the politicians, bureaucrats would have nothing to do and all that money they collect so industriously would sit in a big room somewhere collecting dust. They are like bees who collect pollen every day, it has to be used or sooner or later the hive drowns in it.
Initially, politicians weren’t very good at spending money. Some, in fact, were downright frugal which really tended to gum up the works so bureaucrats had to come up with additional ways to spend money and they did. They invented regulations and they found that it was good. This had the advantage of not only increasing cost but it also helped to teach their political offspring new ways to spend money. This allowed bureaucrats to find new ways to target the collection of money.
They have become so good at imposing regulation that nothing escapes them; nothing is too small or insignificant for some form of government control. They regulate everything.
They regulate traffic with signs instructing us to follow the rules: stop, no parking, no stopping, no turns, right turn only, left turn only, do not enter, no left turn, no right turn, yield, merge and my favourite, proceed with caution.
If it moves, they license it including; boats, cars, bikes, dogs, motorcycles and aircraft. If it’s fun they require a permit be purchased. Bureaucrats are suspicious of fun and so charge citizens to hold parades, community sports events, festivals, outdoor concerts and to make a few bucks as buskers on our streets.
If it is stationary, they tax it and have developed property taxes, agricultural taxes and marketing boards, parking fees and fines for non compliance.
They have effectively squeezed the mob out of the distribution and control of cigarettes, booze and gambling and soon will have pushed them out of illegal drugs. The bureaucracy and their political offspring is considering ways to legalize drugs which will lead to a whole new group of regulations, fees and taxes. Soon, the mob will be reduced to holding garage and bake sales and no one, not even Francis Ford Coppola will want to make movies about them anymore.
If you buy it, you pay a consumption tax. If you sell it you pay income tax on the money you made over a certain amount. If you die, they tax the pennies on your eyes.
They regulate safety, health, transportation, communications, education, the environment, infrastructure development, hunting, fishing, professional and amateur sports and business. In fact, they regulate everything except credit card interest rates and gas prices.
They impose costs on manufacturers with ridiculous labeling restrictions and delay new product development with endless assessments, reviews and licensing processes. The bureaucracy lives for process. It is their oxygen.
The list is endless and even as I write this, somewhere in Canada….perhaps in many somewheres….there are government bureaucrats developing, refining and considering new regulations and planning the number of new bureaucrats it will require to monitor and enforce those regulations.
The simple fact is that the single biggest industry in Canada now is government. When you add all governments together, government employees more people than any other industry. It touches more lives than any other industry including technology. In fact, government touches pretty much every Canadian’s life from birth to death and then, of course, they don’t want anything to do with you although in some jurisdictions you are still permitted to vote after you die .
And that, my friends is the real problem. Government is not an industry. It produces nothing and creates no wealth. It erodes it. Government takes wealth from its citizens and the more wealth it takes the more it threatens the prosperity of every individual and the nation as a whole.
I believe we should all contribute our fair share to provide the common services we need as a society. I even believe in a responsible social safety net but when government is taking half of the wealth generated by a people, it’s starting to cross over into Marie Antoinette territory and that creates unrest that didn’t end well for anybody, especially Marie and many of her friends.
In the United States, the situation is not much better as exemplified by the 22,000 income tax regulations that country's bureaucracy has developed and by the current presidential election campaign. Both candidates are offering government in one form or another as the solution to the problems our American friends are facing but just as it is in Canada, and every other country in the world, democratic and totalitarian alike; government is the problem.
How do I know this?
I ran this post by someone who works for government at a fairly high level and he told me that he agreed and wanted to work towards bringing about real change to government…….and he was prepared to hire as many people as necessary to make that happen.
I could almost hear the mechanical voice inside his head whispering over and over and over again , “this does not compute”.
© 2012 Maggie's Bear
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