{"id":18071,"date":"2017-06-13T07:50:49","date_gmt":"2017-06-13T13:50:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lastbestnews.com\/site\/?p=18071"},"modified":"2017-06-14T01:15:13","modified_gmt":"2017-06-14T07:15:13","slug":"montana-viewpoint-a-starved-government-helps-only-the-rich","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/2017\/06\/montana-viewpoint-a-starved-government-helps-only-the-rich\/","title":{"rendered":"Montana Viewpoint: A starved government helps only the rich"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Jim<\/a>

Jim Elliott<\/p><\/div>\n

Someone once wrote that the only people who are truly free are the very poor and the very\u00a0rich; the poor because they have nothing and the wealthy because they have everything.<\/p>\n

From\u00a0my perspective, considering the way things are going for the middle class, it won\u2019t be too long\u00a0before all of us are truly free.<\/p>\n

Helping to create this surge of freedom are people like Grover Norquist, the founder of Americans for Tax Reform (and curiously enough, the Islamic Free Trade Institute) who said, \u201cI\u00a0want to shrink government to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the\u00a0bathtub.\u201d<\/p>\n

The way to accomplish that, of course, is to starve government by cutting off its food supply\u2014taxes\u2014and waiting for the self-fulfilling prophecy to come to fruition. When you cut government agencies\u2019 budgets, but not their workloads, it makes it more difficult for\u00a0them to do the jobs they’re supposed to do. That creates dissatisfaction among the public and lends seeming credence to those who say, \u201cI told you so, government can\u2019t do the job so private enterprise should.\u201d<\/p>\n

If you want an example, take a look at the U. S. Postal Service, once the best postal delivery system in the world, which has had its funding drained away to the point where there is now some justification to the claim that the private sector could run it better.<\/p>\n

Of course, if you cut taxes to starve government, that money doesn\u2019t just disappear, it has to go somewhere, and where it seems to go is back into the pockets of the very wealthy through tax breaks.<\/p>\n

Coincidentally or not, it is the very wealthy who need government less than the rest of America.<\/p>\n

\"CapreAir_Variable\"<\/a><\/div><\/div>Abraham Lincoln said, \u201cThe legitimate object of government is to do for a community of people whatever they need to have done, but can not do at all, or can not so well do, for themselves\u2014in their separate, and individual capacities.\u201d<\/p>\n

Today, not everyone is a part of that community Lincoln was talking about. There are very wealthy\u00a0people who can do things by themselves either because of their money or the political power that\u00a0money gives them. They don\u2019t need a public safety program because they can live in gated communities and hire their own police forces. They do not need government-funded health insurance because they have their own medical personnel on contract. It is the rest of the people who need government.<\/p>\n

To take the concept of Norquist\u2019s smaller, bathtub-drowned government to its logical conclusion, we would have no police system, no courts, no transportation system, no military, no nothing.<\/p>\n

That\u00a0would create an America where there are two groups of people: being a small number of very wealthy people taking care of their own needs very nicely, thank you; and the rest of America trying to function\u00a0in a state of near lawless anarchy.<\/p>\n

While the ultra-wealthy plutocracy does exist (billionaire Elon Musk has his own space ship program, for goodness\u2019 sake), the potential for America dissolving into anarchy is thankfully losing steam\u2014witness the\u00a0rebellion against crippling tax cuts in Kansas, where the Republican Legislature recently overrode the governor\u2019s veto of a tax increase.<\/p>\n

The needs of middle class Americans, what is left of us, are best fulfilled by responsible government, as the citizens of Kansas have shown.<\/p>\n

Back to Lincoln: \u201cYou can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time,\u00a0but you can not fool all of people all of the time.\u201d<\/p>\n

Jim Elliott is a former chairman of the Montana Democratic Party and a former state senator from Trout Creek.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Someone once wrote that the only people who are truly free are the very poor and the very\u00a0rich; the poor because they have nothing and the wealthy because they have everything. From\u00a0my perspective, considering the way things are going for the middle class, it won\u2019t be too long\u00a0before all of us are truly free.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":64,"featured_media":18072,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3864],"tags":[2735,5943,3522],"class_list":["post-18071","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-opinion","tag-abraham-lincoln","tag-grover-nordquist","tag-u-s-postal-service","prominence-category-featured"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18071","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/64"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18071"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18071\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18074,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18071\/revisions\/18074"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/18072"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18071"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18071"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18071"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}