Here are some definitions of Big Government from a few online dictionaries.

“Government perceived as being excessively big-spending and attempting to control too many aspects of people’s lives.” MSN Encarta

“Government that seems to have too much control over people’s lives.” Macmillan

“Any government wielding excessive control over its citizens or interfering with their lives.” Dictionary.com

You see the themes – control, interference, wasteful, big-spending.

That’s true, of course, but we’d like to be a little more specific and thought-provoking in our definition.

Big Government, in its most raw form, is a group of individuals that through coercion turns human beings into either beasts of burden or perpetual children.

It is that group which preaches entitlement over responsibility, dependency over self-sufficiency.  It purports that people are incapable of caring for themselves through free and voluntary choices, and therefore must be coerced into “doing the right thing.” It prevents human beings from being fully actualized, keeps them in a form of subjection and – in its most extreme form – slavery.

Does it do this deliberately and willfully?  Not in the beginning.  Isabel Paterson, in her book The God of the Machine, said:

“Most of the harm in the world is done by good people, and not by accident, lapse, or omission. It is the result of their deliberate actions, long persevered in, which they hold to be motivated by high ideals toward virtuous ends… …[W]hen millions are slaughtered, when torture is practiced, starvation enforced, oppression made a policy, as at present over a large part of the world, and as it has often been in the past, it must be at the behest of very many good people, and even by their direct action, for what they consider a worthy object.”

Even the alleviation of suffering, so long as it is done through plundering third parties, will result in more total suffering induced than ever relieved.  The total amount of suffering in the world cannot be reduced by forcing one group of human beings to relieve it in the way the tyrant desires.  The tyrant’s coercion makes more of mankind miserable, turns them away from productive endeavors.  In its extreme forms, Big Government paradoxically kills innocents in order to save lives.

Seen in this way, Big Government can either be a Tyrant or a Nanny, or a combination of both.  Either it enslaves you and coercively makes you work on its behalf, or it “protects” you from yourself, restricting your freedom while promising to care for your every need, in exchange for your agreement to keep it in power.

Either way, it treats you as either an animal to be burdened, or a scolded child to be suckled forever at its teat.

How you are treated often depends on whether or not you are willing to keep the ruling cadre in power.  If you do, you may lose your freedom but win the privilege of being coddled.  If you don’t, you may lose your freedom and be burdened.

So Big Government divides people into two groups: one group is the animals burdened with the task of producing the mothers milk forever; the other is that group which forever – or so it’s promised – drinks the mothers milk.

Now, in pointing this out, we’re not talking about any specific group that is favored by government and eats from the labor of others, we’re talking about all such group, from bailed out banks and companies, to subsidized farmers, to protected unions, to groups that benefit from tariffs, to the ever-growing unproductive government bureaucracy; in short, any form of corporate or public dependency program.

One of the central features of Big Government is that it encourages bad behavior in order to remain in power.  It bails out those who have made bad decisions in order to gain their support.

The individuals that comprise Big Government, of course, play god, determining which group of human beings will be the beasts of burden, and which will be the bailed out, dependent children.

Over time, people learn that it does not pay to behave responsibly.  In fact, the consequences for poor judgment will be so lessened as to have no moral authority over behavior.  People learn that they can live life however irresponsibly they want and some one else will be forced to pick up the tab … that is, until there’s no one left with any money or productive resources.

At that point, the system collapses soviet-style.  The beasts of burden decide that it’s easier to be suckled infants and then there are no longer enough producers to support the dependents.

One interesting phenomenon that we have noticed over the past decades is how Americans have behaved regarding debt and savings, and how the past decisions they made are now affecting them.

Look at what has happened in the U.S. over the last few decades.

This first graph shows the U.S. Savings rate (what percentage of their incomes Americans saved) over the past 50 years.

Notice that, for whatever reason, over the last 30 years people have been putting less and less money away for a rainy day.

Now, look at this graph of household debt as a percentage of disposable income over the last 30 years.

Despite saving less money, people are using more borrowed money to support their lifestyles, especially over the last decade.

Low savings rate + high and increasing debt load = people living beyond their means

At some point, the gig is up.

Now, look at this graph of the number of food stamp recipients over the last decade.  In the decades prior to 2000, the number of food-stamp recipients had been trending down.

So here’s the questions:

Are these events merely correlated or is there an element of causation?  That is, do government bailout promises encourage people to not take responsibility for their own lives, to prepare for “unforeseen” – yet predictable – misfortunes in the future?

Understand that we’re not arguing for or against this particular social program, just merely asking questions about whether or not Government Dependency Programs create Moral Hazard.

What do you think?  Do government handout programs enable bad behavior?

Does the knowledge that someone will be there to give you food, coupled with the knowledge that the government has the capacity to forever force someone else to pay for your livelihood, make you take less responsibility for your own well being, live on borrowed money, not save for a rainy day?

By asking these questions, of course we’re not advocating for letting the hungry starve.  We advocate for the support of voluntary charities, and lots of it, and we believe that each of us has a personal responsibility to responsibly care for the poor among us in ways that do not create dependency and thereby rob recipients of their dignity.

If you reward bad behavior, you’ll get more of it.  If you punish responsible behavior, you’ll get less of it.

Big Government must be opposed.  If we don’t oppose it immediately, over time in its most extreme forms it reduces people to animals or infants.

As Cato’s Letter #38 taught:

“What is government, but a trust … which ought to be bounded with many and strong restraints, because power renders men wanton, insolent to others, and fond of themselves.”

So what can you do? 

Sign up for our RSS feed and become a fan of our Facebook Page. We’ll continually send you information about how you can help keep government in its place.

Then, Join DownsizeDC.org and participate in it’s campaigns.  It takes less than five minutes per day, and you just participate in the campaigns you like.  In our opinion, it is the best project around for reducing the size and scope of Big Government.

originally published May 21, 2010.

There were many lessons learned (not least of which that there’s no such thing as a “pro-life” Democrat, Harry Reid and Bart Stupak taught us this), but this is what we learned most:

In the battle for the hearts and minds of Americans, we won.  When this vote was finally taken, only 35% of American’s wanted it.  One in five Democrats voted against it.

And we defeated the “public option” and that was the most vital part of the battle.  In the end, what these so-called progressives got was a massive handout to insurance companies and a crazy plan based on the already-failing Romney-care in Massachusetts whose entire substance is pointing a gun at people and demanding that they buy insurance.  (By the way, don’t forget in 2012 that Romney was no friend on this health-debate, even penning an op-ed in USA today advocating for a plan very similar to the one just passed.)

The way forward will be multi-faceted, but never forget, in the battle for the hearts and minds of America, we defeated them.  Unfortunately, their power and corruption were too much to overcome, this round.

Make no mistake, overcoming this will be very difficult – but keep in mind that NJ and VA kicked out their Democrat Governers, Ted Kennedy’s seat was lost to a person whose primary platform was anti-healthcare, and the Democrats who voted for this are headed for a slaughter in 2010.

What we have going for us right now is that the full program does not take effect for four years.  In that time, this legislation will be bombarded and attacked non-stop.

The place that this legislation will be best challenged is not in the federal executive and legislative branches (at least not initially).  It will be challenged in court on constitutional grounds (where our case is very strong), and it will be challenged by the states themselves (particularly by pissed-off Attorneys General who may just have the numbers to push a constitutional convention if necessary – it’s more possible than you think since this Bill assuredly bankrupts states which are already on the verge of insovency).

Do not lose hope.  The fight was worth it.  The momentum is still with us, and these Democrats will rue this day which will live in infamy.

Cry your tears tonight if you must, but get some good sleep and let your heart be at peace – then wake up tomorrow and sharpen your knives.  We’re going right back at them.

Amateur film released on the Internet rocked the organizations and threatened their existence. 

The way each organization handled its respective crisis exposed a lot about the nature and character of the people who manage the organizations and helps us understand that, yes, ACORN deserves to disappear and have its executives investigated.

President Obama’s ties to ACORN should also be revisited and investigated, as should those of his current Political Affairs Director, who prior to joining the Administration worked for ACORN.

Domino’s problem video showed employees doing disgusting things to food that was to be served to customers.

ACORN’s problem videos were of a far more serious nature – ACORN employees aiding, abetting, and encouraging serious felony criminal behavior, including counseling people who came to them on how to smuggle underage illegal-immigrant girls into the U.S. to be employed as sex workers and then launder the funds (tax free!) that came from the work.

Both organizations faced an existential threat over the release and viral spread of these amateur videos.

To get an idea about the leadership character of both organizations, we can to look to what each did when the videos were released.

Domino’s expressed outrage at the employees’ behavior and immediately issue a public apology to customers.

ACORN expressed defiance and outrage at the filmmakers and said the films were doctored.  When additional films came out disproving this and made clear a pattern of corruption in ACORN’s offices nationwide, only then did ACORN leaders express outrage at employee behavior; yet they still refused to issue an apology or open the organizations records to show that the problems were isolated incidents in order to put to rest the suspicion that the corruption is systemic.

How did each organization deal with the employees implicated in the videos?

Domino’s filed a criminal complaint and pursued felony charges against the employees.

ACORN said that they “terminated” their problem employees but really just suspended them without pay, and then sued the filmmakers and threatened to sue news organizations that showed the videos!

Any principled and non-corrupt CEO would be sickened to discover such behavior from her employees, but feel grateful to find out this information and put an end to it.

But ACORN’s CEO, Bertha Lewis, does not appear to be embracing this role.  She initially stated blatant untruths about the films and refused to take ownership of the exposed corruption.  Once the evidence continued to roll out and was undeniable,  she acted like a concerned CEO and even went so far as to thank the filmmakers for exposing the corruption; but then moments later she threatened to sue the filmmakers for having uncovered the corruption! It might be funny if it weren’t true. What an unbelievable contradiction.

Bertha Lewis heads up a serially corrupt organization. She presides over an organization that is rotten to the core.  In the real world, she’d have been let go long before now, but she’s still there, and that further scandalizes the organization.

No wonder ACORN public perception is in the toilet.

Bertha Lewis needs to be questions about how much criminal activity she may have been aware of at ACORN – she’s a 16 year veteran of the organization and has worked there in many capacities and levels.  It’s not just these videos only that have occurred during her tenure, but many other scandals she has presided over.

She has presided over documented voter registration fraud. In fact, just last month ACORN suffered yet another blow when a former ACORN employee, a director of the Las Vegas office, agreed to testify about ACORN’s voter fraud in that state.

It is now dawning on people that ACORN may have thrown the Minnesota Senate Race, which resulted in the election of Al Franken to the Senate by a mere 312 votes.  Mickey Kaus surmised:

“ACORN claimed to have registered 48,000 new Minnesota voters. If just 1% were ineligible but cast ballots, or had ballots cast for them illegally, and survived the recount process … that’s 480 votes, almost certainly overwhelmingly cast for Franken.”

In addition to serially encouraging felony behavior and engaging in rampant voter-registration fraud, ACORN also shakes down businesses and engages in tax-cheating.

ACORN is a criminal organization, engaging in systematic and repeated organized crime.  It is, along with its sister organization SEIU, part of a Mafia-like structure that preys upon the poor and extorts money from the productive.

Perhaps the greatest outrage of all is that your president has long ties to ACORN over nearly two decades.

President Obama trained ACORN activists, worked as an attorney for ACORN, and also funded ACORN activities.

Of the recent controversies with ACORN, Obama said:

“Frankly, it’s not really something I’ve followed closely. I didn’t even know that ACORN was getting a whole lot of federal money.”

Really?  The man who over two decades worked with them, distributed money to them and worked as their attorney didn’t know they were getting a lot of federal money?

In 2007, Obama spoke to ACORN leaders and said:

“I’ve been fighting alongside of ACORN on issues you care about my entire career. Even before I was an elected official, when I ran Project Vote in Illinois, ACORN was smack dab in the middle of it, and we appreciate your work.“

And not only that, Bertha Lewis’s former political director in New York, Patrick Gaspard, is now the Obama White House Political Affairs Director.  By way of Gaspard, there’s a direct line of communication between the ACORN CEO and President Obama.

It gets worse.  The Obama campaign actually paid money to ACORN to get out the vote for Obama, and then misrepresented it on their financial statements.

The Wall Street Journal reported that:

“The Obama campaign also gave Citizens Consulting, Inc., an ACORN subsidiary, $832,000 for get-out-the-vote activities in key primary states. In filings with the Federal Election Commission, the Obama campaign listed the payments as “staging, sound, lighting,” only correcting the filings after the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review revealed their true nature.”

Will our President and his team keep putting money into ACORN’s pocket and then obscure it in their financial statements?

ACORN is losing federal taxpayer funding (can you believe you were funding this racket?) and corporate backing, but more needs to be done to remove this blight and cancer from the American landscape forever.

Call your Representatives and express your feeling that ACORN should never again receive any taxpayer funding and that you want them to be criminally investigated by Congress.

Let them know that as a taxpayer you are outraged at what they’ve done with your taxpayer money and you want to see justice done.

And then let them know you want the Obama Administration’s ties to ACORN investigated.

Consider holding a rally near your local ACORN office and inviting the press to cover your rally, demanding that ACORN be investigated and prosecuted by your local government.  Make sure to obtain permits as necessary.

Investigate your elected officials for their ties to ACORN and, if they are found, disseminate that information and mount a pressure campaign to require your representatives to publicly denounce ACORN.

Please share this information with others. If enough Americans understand ACORN’s corruption and the Obama Administration’s ties to it, it could help slow his Big Government agenda, and defeating Big Government is what SBABG is all about.

Sign up for our RSS feed and become a fan of our Facebook Page. We’ll keep you updated about how Big Government and its corrupt partners work to destroy the rule of law and what you can do to combat them.

The Wall Street Journal published a piece yesterday that ties this corruption in NJ to the cankering influence of Big Government programs and policies and also highlights the malaise the state is suffering as its Big Government programs make war on Small Businesses.

It’s worth the read, and is a case study on where the country is headed.  We already have a pretty good case study in California where 7% of the US population lives, yet where 32% of Welfare recipients reside and where the Big Government there has squandered all prosperity it once had.

Read the article for the details of the whole sordid case study.  Here are the key conclusions:

Big Government is why New Jersey created only 6,800 private sector jobs from 2000 to 2007—while public sector jobs grew by more than 55,800. Big Government is the reason New Jersey ranks as the worst of 50 states on the Small Business Survival Index. And Big Government is a leading reason New Jersey has a “corruption problem” that an FBI agent at Friday’s press conference characterized as “one of the worst, if not the worst, in the nation.”

Sandy McClure, co-author of the book “The Soprano State: New Jersey’s Culture of Corruption,” agrees that big government is a big reason behind the state’s corruption problem. “You have all these little authorities that everyone has to go to for permission,” she says. “Too much government means too many opportunities for officials looking to cash in. And there’s no way that the press can keep track of it all.”

Ms. McClure is right: The more extensive government’s reach, the more opportunities the governing class has to steal from and shake down the productive class …

…The point is that politicians and officials have more to sell in an environment of high taxes, big spending and overregulation—the same things that help explain New Jersey’s anemic economic growth and job creation. When government gets too big and complicated for businesses to get their permits and approvals and funding honestly, the dishonest prosper. And the honest get fed up and flee.”

Big Government fails everywhere it is tried.  Where does your state rank on the Small Business Survival Index?  Any correlation you’d notice with Big Government’s influence?

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