Long-time readers are acquainted with the fact I’m not fan of government. I’m not speaking of the present government in particular; I am referring instead of government in general. The reasons are multitudinous and varied, but instead of going through those, allow me to share the front page of our little hometown paper, Palo Alto’s own Daily Post.
I’d like to say a few words about each of the articles on the front page, starting at the bottom and moving clockwise. I’ll use the same format as the headlines themselves:
Special ed funding fraud claimed – this is a story about corruption in a middle school. Apparently, there was a scheme running in which the principal would put kids into special ed classes when in fact the kids had no reason to be in there at all. The reason? They state gives a lot more money to the district for each of those kids, and the principal was skimming funds for luxury goods. This was only discovered because the special ed teacher complained about all the non “special” kids that were getting sent to her, so the principal fired her.
Just to make it worse, they also found the school was spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on new age crap like “energy healer” Alycia Chavis-Diggs who, sorry to say, looks exactly like what you’d expect:
Barbara Lee Wins – This story is about a special mayoral race in Oakland, since Mayor Sheng Thao was totally corrupt and has since been replaced by a super-left-wing radical named Barbara Lee who had the distinction of being the ONLY member of Congress to be against going to war when with after 9/11.
Public Faults Schools – here we have a report that the majority of California adults believes the school system is heading in “the wrong direction” (whatever THAT means – – maybe they don’t have enough energy healers?). Four years ago, 62% of adults thought schools were heading in the right direction, and these days it’s not even 50%.
Night Court – this blurb is about Samuel Alito bitching how the recent Supreme Court ruling was “literally in the middle of the night“, which I guess cramps his 9-to-5 expectations.
The Update – this is just a snippet of financial data, with the most prominent being an update on the national debt, which stands at $36.748 trillion and is growing a trillion dollars every 100 days.
Students ask for honors classes – in this instance, the school district has taken away the accelerated and honors classes, and the smart kids and their parents are begging to have them back, instead of giving all the funding to the ‘tards in the school. This is close to my heart, since I was a gifted kid and loved all the honors classes I got to take.
Lake dries up, turtles dying – finally, we have a story in which a woman has found folks have abandoned turtles in a local pond which is drying up, and she is taking action to save them.
So, in summary, with this clockwise survey of seven elements from the front page, we have:
- government corruption and waste;
- government corruption;
- lack of faith in the governent;
- dysfunctional governent;
- hopelessly indebted government;
- misallocation of government funds;
- the one and only story about a private citizen, who is in fact doing something virtuous
None of this has anything to do with Trump (except, very obliquely, number 4) but instead is almost exclusively about local politics. And this is just from our little 50,000 person town! Having seen thousands of articles like those above over my lifetime, it’s no surprise that I’d love to see a world in which there’s virtually no government at all. We’d all have money stacked up to our necks from the taxes we’d save, and the quantity of screw-ups, rip-offs, and waste would shrink to nearly nothing.
It’s just a pointless fantasy, I realize. I also realize that a certain portion of the population is so blinkered and hapless that they actually need a father figure in the form of government just to get along. Yet study anything at all the government has done to “help”, including the literally hundreds of billions wasted on helping the homeless, and you’ll soon realize that it’s all just pointless.
It would be fascinating to see a society which was entirely dependent on private enterprise and personal liberties. I truly wonder if humanity could hack it. Some of us could, I bet.
