Walk down the street and ask people about some problem that concerns you — financial, social , legal, psychological — and more than likely the responses will be “there ought to be a law,” or “the government should take care of that,” Why is it that so many people look to the government for the solution of their problems, when the government is usually the cause, or at least part, of the problem?
And when, furthermore, there is no evidence that government intervention can do anything other than making the problem worse than it is already?
Is the problem that you haven’t got a job? There is no way the government can give you a job except by taking the money out of somebody else’s pocket. The only way a job can be created without stealing from another family who needs the money just as much as you do is if government gets off the backs of industry so private investment is encouraged to create new jobs.
Is the problem that you can’t make ends meet because you are caught between taxes and inflation ? Government has no incentive whatsoever to remedy that problem because government profits by inflation.
When you get a wage increase, you go into a higher income tax bracket, so the government not only gets more of your money, but it gets a windfall profit because you are forced into a higher rate of income taxes.
Is the problem that your husband divorced you and left you high and dry with little income? The reason he was able to do that is probably the new easy no-fault divorce laws, put through 48 state legislatures in the last few years, usually by divorced legislators who wanted to make it easy to walk out on a marriage without any penalty being paid by the guilty party.
Is the problem that your children are into drugs, alcohol, premarital sex, or teenage pregnancy? The cause is a combination of Supreme Court decisions (beginning in the 1960s) that took prayer and moral training out of the schools, and the “situation ethics” which secular humanists brought into the schools to fill the vacuum.
Under situation ethics, even the trampling death of eleven persons at the rock concert in Cincinnati on December 3 would be understandable. After all, the “situation” called for pushing inside to get the $10 seat the rock enthusiasts had paid for, and situation ethics teaches young people to seek their own pleasure without discipline.
Is the problem that your children can’t read the help wanted ads in the newspaper, fill out a job application, or count change from a cashier? The cause is the failure of the public schools to teach basic reading and math skills . Plenty of money has been spent to build schools, buy books, and pay teachers’ salaries , but we didn’t get the product we paid for.
Is the problem that it isn’t safe for a woman to drive home alone at night from her job or social evening or even go to a parking lot in the daytime — because she is in deathly fear of becoming another rape victim, whose gory tales provide daily reading in our newspapers? The cause is a combination of the sexuality without morality training in the schools, the failure to enforce obscenity laws against movie houses, newsstand dealers, textbooks and television shows, and the ineffective criminal justice system which gives rapists 100-to-one odds of going free. Because of Court-invented restrictions on the questioning of suspects, many rape crimes are never solved.
When are the American people going to realize that a new federal bureau and the spending of more tax dollars will not solve the many problems we face in our daily lives. In most cases, a new federal bureau only aggravates the problem.
We have an energy problem so Carter created the Department of Energy. It has not produced one barrel of oil or one ton of coal or one kilowatt of energy, and has only interfered with the real producers. At Carter’s demand, Congress has just created a new Department of Education, another immense bureaucracy. Anyone who thinks this will improve one child’s ability to read, spell, or add must be living in some kind of dream world.
The best way to cope with most of these problems is to reduce the incredible flow of our hard-earned money into the pockets of the federal bureacrats. The election year of 1980 is the year to do that.
