Government for the people?
You may have noticed that conservatives like attacking programs such as…free health-care, public education, ending corporate welfare, taxation, and any proactive governance as the evil “Big Government.” The old phrase, “government is the problem, not the solution” is spewed forth like the word of God in an attempt to create so-called freedom through the market.
There’s just one problem with this: conservatives don’t practice it. Neither side does; a large government is far more convenient, something we can’t live without today. What we have now isn’t a battle over whether we should have a small government or a big government, but what KIND of big government we should have. What I see as the political/philosophical debate of our day is if we should have a government which invests in people, or one that invests in bombs.
In recent history we have seen an increase in Big Government, some administrations have tried to use government to solve real issues (like the War on Poverty). But the trend in decades past has been to create an even bigger government with regards to military spending. According to Howard Zinn (A People’s History), by the late 1990s military spending was at $600 billion a year. Of course that was before 9/11; today, the number is even higher, and we’ve seen the biggest government created in the history of mankind, with an absurdly large military. With 5% of the world’s population, we have 50% of its military spending.
There’s a reason why today’s big government likes having a big military: war is profitable. No, killing people isn’t, but that’s a fact often overlooked. As long as military contractors and corporations can make money building bombs, they’ll pressure the government to drop them. Imagine if we took a fraction of the amount of money our government spends to create this surplus of military force for actual good, say…building schools, subsidizing healthcare, or creating a foreign policy that embraces peace and aide rather than carrot/stick imperial ambitions.
Now many of you might say,”Hey man, don’t you support the troops?!?” Sure I do, I support human beings, I just can’t stand the out-of-control military-industrial complex that is our “defense.” The security problems encountered with the so called “War on Terror” could all be traced back by direct and indirect means to the use of military force by our government (as Malcom X would have it, chickens coming home to roost). The world doesn’t hate us because we’re free, but because our leaders like to use force to help big business and impose dictators sympathetic to their interests.
The debate over what kind of big government we should have is really a moral issue: should we continue to destroy our credibility around the world and our society at home? Or should we start to build? Let’s start using the people’s government to work with people, to invest in people. Government doesn’t have to be a great evil in society; government can be a place for ideas—a place, as Toby Ziegler from The West Wing once said, where, “people can come together.”
- El Che
The conservative demonization of “big government” is very interesting in relation to their notion of liberty. Might make a good topic for a PVC meeting…
Wow, I think you might be the first Berkeley student to ever quote Howard Zinn. But really, this is derivative writing at its finest.
Building schools and subsidizing health care do not solve our domestic issues. They are at best a step in the right direction. The United States is the only industrialized nation in the world that does not view health care as a human right. Insurance companies are insuring the healthy while the people who do not have health insurance need it the most. We need single-payer health care like every other industrialized country in the world.
As for our education system, we need to do much more than just build schools. Our urban public schools are receiving fewer funds than before as more of the middle class sends their children to private schools. The embarrassment that we call our public school system is turning into something that destines our urban children to social immobility. Sarah Knopp, who is a teacher, activist, and ran against Jack O’Connell for the position of State Superintendent of Public Instruction said, “It is not that politicians and the rich don’t ‘understand’ the problem. They have no incentive to make the system succeed for poor children.”
If we think that our health care and education systems need more funding, we are missing the bigger picture. We need to evaluate what we want to see our health care and education system do for American society as a whole, not just the middle and upper class.