Quo Vadis US Government

So I was a spy.  I was a KGB spy – a hardened communist anti-American, anti-capitalist undercover KGB agent.  Sometimes I think that this nothing but a bad dream.  But people, most prominently among them FBI agents, tell me that I was indeed a hardened communist anti-American, anti-capitalist undercover KGB agent.

Today I am an American citizen.  I am first generation American, albeit with a rather odd path to citizenship.  Not only am I a citizen, I am also emotionally, intellectually, and instinctively an American, and I can prove it to myself,

During a conversation with my wife about the Cold War, and in particular the Cuban Missile Crisis, she heard me say the following words: “And then we (sic!) discovered that the Soviets had deployed nuclear missiles in Cuba…..”.  My wife looked at me quizzically and asked: “Who is we, the Germans, the Americans or the Russians?”  That would be a strange question to ask of most people, but not of somebody who was born and raised in Germany, spied for the Russians and is now an American citizen.

Of course, it was the American U2 planes that did the discovering, and the fact that I, who was a 13-year-old German boy at the time, used the word we in this context, is incontrovertible evidence that I am not just a proud holder of an American passport but that I also identify myself instinctively and emotionally as an American.  It is one thing to pay lip service to citizenship, it is quite another for one’s heart to be solidly committed to this great country.  In fact, if I were given the choice between life in Germany and the United States – all things equal – I would not hesitate for a moment to pick the US.

With those bona fide credentials as a citizen comes a responsibility that cannot be taken lightly.  And since I have a dual perspective both as an insider – I have lived here for 39 years – as well as an outsider – the other 29 years I lived under communist rule – I feel qualified to raise important issues concerning the future of our country.

I am concerned, deeply concerned, with the direction this country has taken.  We are on course to slowly have our individual freedoms taken away or simply giving them away.  Take your pick, the end result is the same.  I like to say that there are two institutions in our society that are there to help people: the medical system and the legal system.  Nevertheless, they should be avoided like the plague because they also have the capacity to inflict deep hurt (e.g. accidental infections, convictions of the innocent).  Add a third one to that list:  Big Government.

Partisan politics has reached an unbearable cacophonous crescendo in our time.  Both parties try to outdo each other in their efforts to paint the other side as the enemy of the people.  But it is my claim that neither the Democrats nor Republicans that are the enemy, it is Big Government as an institution, regardless of who is running it.  Don’t get me wrong, I have not become an anarchistic firebrand – there is a legitimate role for a government “of the people, by the people, for the people” which is, in general terms, watching over the common good.  But I balk, when others, to whom I have not delegated the power to do so, usurp my right to make decisions on my own behalf and on behalf of my family.

I grew up in a country where government was everything.  Government owned the means of production; government determined what was taught in school; government assigned you a job; government managed the waiting lists for apartments, cars, and telephones; government handed out vacation vouchers; government choked off any competing thoughts and ideologies; and government even regulated what kind of music could be played at public dances.

Oh, it was all for the common good – most people who worked in government were not evil, indeed. They “knew” that they were serving a good cause to bring about justice for all.  Among other slogans, the East German government adopted the motto of the French Revolution ” liberté égalité fraternité”,  conveniently removing the “liberty” part from it.   After all, government and the Party knew best.  The unofficial hymn of the ruling Socialist Unity Party still rings in my ears: “Die Partei, die Partei, die Partei hat immer recht” (The Party is Always Right).

And when it was necessary to curtail or suppress freedom in service of the common good, it was done so efficiently, in cold blood, and if deemed necessary, with brutality.  The most egregious example of such action was the erection of the Berlin Wall.  But closer to home – I grew up in a small village – it was the forced collectivization of agriculture.  I was about 12 years old when I witnessed some odd goings on in our sleepy village.  Trucks with slogans “Join the LPG” (LPG is the German acronym for Agricultural Collective) and speakers with bullhorns were cruising the neighborhood.  My father, who was a member of the Party, spent long evenings talking to neighboring farmers about the advantages of the LPG.  The pressure was tremendous and included the withholding of scarce resources.  In the end, even the most stubborn individualists had to give up, and by the mid-60s all of East German agriculture was collectivized, and as a result, individual freedoms suffered, but it was all for the common good…………

I gladly submitted to that regime, because I was one of the “chosen ones.”  If I had not decided on a career in intelligence, I would have been one of the lucky ones to have their pick as far as a career after college.  The majority of my fellow chemistry graduates had their jobs assigned to them, and some of those jobs were located in very ugly and highly polluted parts of the country.

Interestingly, a rather sizable section of my contemporaries in East Germany still long for the good old days of Communism with the state taking care of them cradle to grave.  They grew up in a society that stunted their growth as individuals by taking away the most important of all freedoms: The freedom to fail.  Unfortunately, this freedom may well be the first one to completely disappear from our country as well.

People get into politics or join government for a number of different reasons:

• They have a calling for “public service” – they want to help others
• They feel that they are simply better and smarter than most of us and therefore well equipped to guide us in our decision making
• They like the relative job security and the benefits
• They don’t know what else to do with themselves

No matter the motivation, the end result is invariably the same – these folks wind up in positions where they either make or enforce decisions that impact all of us.

It seems reasonable to assume that the men and women who wind up in government are not much different from the rest of us.  I have not seen any evidence that as a group they are smarter, wiser or better qualified than the nation at large.  So, then what or who gives them the right to make and enforce myriad decisions that impact my life? Who or what gives them the authority to do so?   We do not grant politicians explicit permission to act on our behalf, but we do give them implicit authority by voting for them again and again.  But what about the bureaucrats who are not elected and who have vast powers to issue thousands of rules?  Who granted them the authority, implicit or explicit?  Nobody, really – they usurped it.

What scares me even more is the following:  I am ALWAYS subject to the consequences, good or bad, of my own decisions.  Government bureaucrats rarely are and therefore, accountability is diluted and often disappears completely.  When delegating self-interest to others, it is stripped of the “self” element (not to be mistaken for selfish).

 

“I want those politicians in Washington to work together to get things done”.   This sentiment can be heard from the left, the right, and almost everyone in between.  It has become part of the national DNA.  And that is SCARY.  The implication of “getting things done” is that there will be more laws, more regulations and more services delegated to the federal government.  It appears that government is subject to the same natural law as our universe, namely the Hubble Law according to which inexorable expansion is built into its existence.   If that is the case, government will grow until has taken control of all meaningful activity in society.  I am pessimistic about our chances to reverse this process, but at least we should attempt to slow it down.  Therefore, and at a minimum, I would like to change the word in the quote above from “done” to “undone”. In order to buck the expansionary trend, our lawmakers need to work as diligently on sun setting old rules as they are making new ones.

As it stands right now, we the people are doing very little to even effectuate the slow- down.  Just like the frog who does not sense that the pot of water he is sitting in is getting gradually hotter until it is too late, we allow government to nibble away at our freedoms bit by bit, until it might be too late.  Partially, this benign neglect is driven by greed – we all like free stuff, and we love a government that distributes goodies.  The problem is that those goodies are never free – somebody will pay for them.  For the most part, government does not create value, it redistributes value, and in the process, it makes the things it redistributes more costly.  Somebody needs to pay for the massive redistribution machine and everybody in it!

An ever-growing central government is the extreme form of collectivism.  Interestingly, that type of statist collectivism was practiced not only by the Soviet rulers, but also by Hitler, Mussolini and other dictators (Now that I used “Hitler” I would like to note that I despise the name calling practiced by some individuals in the public arena who like to compare rather mainstream politicians with the Nazis or Communists – I won’t participate in that despicable clownery.  To compare modern day alleged scoundrels to Hitler and Stalin is to make light of the massive crimes against humanity committed by those monsters, and it is an in-your-face insult to the few remaining survivors of those murderous systems).

Follow me for a few steps into fantasy land.  For argument’s sake, let us assume that every single individual in government is fundamentally “good” and dedicated to the service of others.  In order to be able to function and survive, even a benign central government made up of only such individuals cannot tolerate anything but voluntary or forced submission by those governed.  Competing allegiances, cannot be allowed because they challenge central power.  And given a strong trend towards secularism in the Western World, it stands to reason that such a government would likely look upon communities of faith as one of the major competitors to be brought to heel. This in turn would result in a spiritual barrenness, and no matter what everybody else might think, this is unacceptable to me.  No man and no institution should be allowed to come between me and my God!

History has shown the capacity of an all-powerful state to victimize all of its citizens, including the (temporary) rulers themselves.   Other than a watchful people, there is no guaranteed mechanism that will protect us from a radical flip of government from a suffocating force, albeit well-intentioned, to a deliberately central power.  It happened in  Germany – when the Nazis took over, they had immediate access a well-oiled centralized state machine.  Anybody, who says “it cannot happen here” has their head in the sand.  After all, it happened in what was arguably the most advanced country of its time with the best educated citizenry.  It can’t happen here?  Really?

If that flip ever does happen, then God help us all.  The collapse of the Roman Empire set man back about 1,000 years. The collapse of the United states as we know it might have a bigger impact and could result in the end of the world as we know it.

One of the most revolutionary and earth shattering statements ever made in the history of man is the following passage in the Declaration of Independence:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed

I am concerned that there may come point in her life when my now seven-year-old princess will not fully understand the meaning of this document, or worse yet, not even know of its existence anymore.  I pray that this will not happen.