by Neville Kennard, contributing editor

Governments love to interfere and get involved in people’s lives. They find ways to make themselves “needed”. Governments regulate and seek to control to bring about an end they deem to be desirable, or at least politically and electorally popular. Promises of hand-outs, regulations, subsidies, Commissions, and Authorities, buy votes. They use other people’s money to favour their chosen groups and constituents.

They never work, these Commissions, Authorities, subsidies and regulations. The Unintended Consequences outweigh and negate any benefits that the intervention may bring. But the Commissions, Authorities, new government departments, armies of bureaucrats, even though they never succeed in accomplishing their goals, never go away. They fail, but they don’t disappear. In fact, failure is very important to a government program. If a government program succeeded in its goal, if it achieved its end, it could be dissolved because it had “succeeded”. But then all these bureaucrats and officials would be out of a job! So it is important that all government programs fail. The failure gets blamed on “insufficient funding”, “inadequate resources”, “lack of power and authority”. And thus more funding, a bigger budget, some new regulations are sought; the bureau or department can thus grow, employ more bureaucrats, become more important and, of course, get higher salaries.

Thus, you see, it is important that Government Does Not Work. Government will never work. Government must fail. Then it will grow and prosper, at the expense of course of everyone else. Government will grow, taxes will increase, the private sector will shrink under the burden, “Market Failure” will get the blame and the system will grind itself into stagnation.

But isn’t it good to know that we are in the hands of a popularly elected government — Of the People, By the People, For the People?

Or is it really “Government of the People, By the Government, For the Government”?

But the vast majority still believe in the need and the efficacy of their government; especially when it is a democratically-elected government; makes people feel like it is “their government”, “our government”, “my government”; that each vote actually counts and it is not really the tyranny of the majority.