When one thinks of "death by government," either those killed by armed members of the state or the millions who have perished in the vast gulags and prisons run by governmental agents usually come to mind. However, government has demonstrated far more creativity in eliminating people than just by shooting or starving them to death. It also has successfully drowned them while destroying property to the tune of billions of dollars. Here are a couple of horror stories.
Like a man who douses a large pile of rags with gasoline and then warns of a fire hazard, Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan has begun issuing dire warnings of impending inflation after orchestrating several years of explosive monetary growth.
E.O. Wilson of Harvard University is among the world's most esteemed biologists. An authority on ants, he has won two Pulitzer Prizes and coined the term "sociobiology," outraging his peers by suggesting that human behavior has some relation to human nature. Sadly, these triumphs seem to have inspired him to lay down the law on everything—a trend that culminated about a year ago in his book Consilience, which purports to unify all branches of science, religion, ethics, and art into a recipe for human happiness.
Contrary to the propaganda, the EPA has done little or nothing to improve the quality of life and much to diminish it.
The American founders struggled for liberty against grasping government officials. But the despotism of their day was nothing compared with our own.
The attempt by government to collect information on citizens has a long and troubled history. The lesson is that power, once granted, will always be abused.
The census is intrusive by nature, but the Clinton administration's version is brazenly pro-welfare, outrageously invasive, and costly even for states that supposedly benefit from its results.
It was 1934, and government-caused mass unemployment supposedly was being solved by a near mass takeover of the economy by that same government. However, "Do you have a job?" was not the only important question that Uncle Sam had for his subjects. He also wanted to know, "Are You Training Your Child To Be Happy?"
That Nasa is a boondoggle and a socio-economic drain should be obvious to all. How does this bureaucracy continue to get away with it?
From the 1930s through the 1980s, government claimed it could innovate better than private markets. That' s what the boondoggles like TVA, Nasa, and Semitech were all about. Hardly anyone believes that anymore, so the rationale for government regulation of technology has changed. It now concerns such vagaries as fairness and wise resource use.
