PROBLEMS WITH ALL GOVERNMENT AGENCIES AND PROGRAMS

by Dr. Lawrence Wilson

This is a very important article about allowing a government agency to be in charge of activities such as health care, education, welfare, transportation, communication, manufacturing and others.

PERSONAL EXPERIENCES

I have worked for the American federal government in two positions. The first was as a management analyst at the Office of Education in Washington, DC. This was my first real job after graduating college. I was quite excited about it. However, I was sorely disappointed.

I worked hard, but was soon told that I was not to do any work after the noon hour. Otherwise, I would make my superiors look bad, as they did not do much work, even though they were paid at least $100,000.00 annually, plus generous benefits. They would spend hours planning their next vacation, or doing other things not related to their job. So I slowed down, and did much less work.

Also, the workers would eat lunch at a topless bar in Washington, DC, become somewhat drunk, and then come back and disburse literally billions of dollars of student aid. This was all disgusting to me. I realized this was a dysfunctional system, and quit the job after about 4 months. My co-workers were astonished when I quit. They said it is a great job. You put in your 25 years or so, and retire wealthy with a wonderful pension.

About 10 years later, I worked for NIOSH (National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health) in Cincinnati, Ohio. Here people worked harder, setting standards for workplace safety and investigating environmental hazards. However, it was all was controlled by politics – who was in office, and who was putting pressure on us to do this or that. I wrote a long paper about screening tests in the workplace to prevent and detect diseases. However, my paper never saw the light of day, though I worked on it for months.

From these experiences, and many others as a citizen, I learned that:

1. Government workers are quite ordinary people. They are not particularly smart, wise or hard-working. In fact, the government jobs attract people who are mainly concerned with job security, not the challenge of solving society’s problems. Handing responsibility to these people is stupid in the extreme, as they are no more qualified to handle it than you are.

2. The cost of government workers is outlandish. They are paid about twice as much as a worker in the private sector is paid for the same job, when benefits are included. They also have fewer checks and balances to see that they work hard and do what they are supposed to do.

3. The incentives for government workers are backwards. The slower they work, the better, as then more workers must be hired and this means their department becomes larger and their budget larger. All this increases their power and importance. They do not have much incentive to actually solve problems, as this would put them out of business. Please remember this.

4. Centralized control over any activity means that special interests have a much easier time infiltrating the agency and controlling the industry such as healthcare or education. This is another critical problem. It is simply much easier to bribe, intimidate or threaten one agency in Washington, DC that controls healthcare or education, for example, than it is to control thousands of people scattered across America doing a similar job at local levels. Therefore, the problem of corruption and politics controlling things is really quite unstoppable.

A recent study, for example, indicated that over half the scientists at the US Food and Drug Administration had received some kind of benefits from drug companies. This is just one tiny example of a gigantic problem of centralized power and control. Lobbying should be made illegal immediately, but oddly, it is not illegal.

The cumulative result of the above is that when people think that a function should be administered by the government, they do not realize what they are agreeing to. We are told by the mainstream media that government is wise, objective and efficient. This is the opposite of the truth! Government administration tends to be extremely costly, wasteful, corrupt and often abusive.

A BENIGN DICTATORSHIP?

Many people support government health care, government-run education, government medical research, and so on because they say it is like a benign dictatorship. This means that only with a centrally-controlled system can we impose the best solutions to our political, economic and other problems in society.

There is some truth to this. A famous expression about this is that Mussolini, the dictator of Italy in the 1930s, made the trains run on time. However, he also brought total ruin to the economy and people of Italy.

Spiritual problems with government control. In addition to the problems of waste, fraud and abuse, centralized control always demoralizes the people, reducing them to the status of animals in a zoo, caged and controlled, even if they are fed and cared for well. Spiritually, people like to control their own lives, and are as capable or moreso of doing it, if they are given truthful information.

Hidden agendas. I believe that those who advocate government control to “help” the people always have a hidden agenda, which is to set themselves up as the elites, and to make the rest of the people dependent upon the elites for essential services. This increases the power and usually the wealth of the elites, and diminishes the power and wealth of the people. So beware of humanitarian-sounding arguments in favor of government health care, government welfare, government education and more.

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