Wednesday, December 10, 2008

"Look Mom, no fiscal restraint!"

It appears nothing stops the forward progress of big government.

The Infectious Greed blog passed along the following bond addendum filed by the state of Illinois in the process of trying to borrow $1.4 billion after the arrest of Gov. Rod Blagojevich.

It's not the same thing, but when I saw this it immediately made me think of a very similar dollar figure that some in the state of Kentucky want to keep quiet.

1 comment:

Hempy said...

Progress by definition is always forward. If there's any problem with government, it's not big government but that lack of good government.

The last eight years of failed Bush, conservative economics was the effort to remove government controls. That's both big and bad government.

Good government is having sufficient numbers available to adequately monitor the activities of those that affect the care and happiness of the people.

In a football game, there can be up to seven officials monitoring the activities of 22 players. That's about a 31% supervision rate.

We're not angels and so need supervision. As Alexander Hamilton and/or James Madison wrote in Federalist Paper 51:

"If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself."

There's some more of those pesky American values that are the bane of conservatives.