Can you feel us swirling around the bowl?

It may be an inevitable tendency, as one grows older, to look back and try to make sense of changes that have occurred. Rather than evaluating my own life and choices, I'm more often considering what has happened to the nation I was born into. Perhaps that shift is due to my own life being clearly finite, and that the path of our nation could continue for a much longer time. I am more concerned about how our national and local context will affect the lives of my children. Those thoughts are severely depressing, because I feel that we have failed our children... failed to provide them with a context at least as good as the one my generation grew up in. What our children face is daunting, and getting worse every day. Yes, I know that they're coping, and even having some fun, making some progress, and building their lives. What they may not be fully aware of, as they work through life, is how constricted their choices are becoming, and how precarious their successes are.

Our children are faced with hugely expanded government at all levels... government that has gradually increased its control over every aspect of our lives, and become far more intrusive and judgmental... and in the process become enormously expensive. We each pay for unending war that is completely without justification. Even if war were to stop, we will still pay for a gigantic military industry establishment that President Eisenhower warned us about 47 years ago. Every segment of government has developed an "establishment"... corporations and organizations whose success depends on government contracts and favorable legislation. Those corporations and organizations spend large sums of money lobbying government because they gain financial advantages that far outweigh their expense.

They buy legislation and regulation that will benefit themselves at the expense of the rest of us, and they have enough profit to produce media campaigns to convince the public that we should have enjoyed being raped. They lie, deceive, contort the truth, and bribe to benefit themselves. They do it because they can... because it works, and it works because our governments have become so corrupted that they lay out the financial feast in plain view, waiting for them to take advantage of it.

It's a massive national publicity scam. Simply put, one can go to legislators with a grandiose, bafflingly-elaborate scam, accompanied by the promise of great publicity for the results, which will reflect back splendidly on the legislators in their next election campaign. They will be able to point to results with perhaps real but grossly inflated results that will impress voters. The voters, busy with their increasingly complex personal lives, will fail to understand the many downsides to the scam, and will believe the publicity. Over time, such scams have become so prevalent that those corporations who don't lobby for privilege are gradually withering away.

More and more of us become direct or indirect employees of government... we become part of the problem. Once inside the system, it becomes to our own advantage to see the system continue and expand. I check the local job market often. I look for jobs that won't involve me in working for government or in a business that is dependent on government. That eliminates most jobs. Most amazing to me is that the majority of jobs available now are in the healthcare industry. That is a direct result of government involvement in health care... Medicare, Medicaid, health regulations, insurance regulations, etc. As part of that huge change, most jobs are now from giant corporations. The larger the corporation, the more profitable they can be at "working the government system". Thus, in Minnesota, for example, we have a state moratorium on building hospitals, which means we're all driven to those ever-expanding conglomerate hospital organizations already in existence.

A look in almost any industry will undoubtedly reveal the same corrupt system, benefiting those who can afford to seek and gain government privilege at the expense of the rest of us. The results are all around us, and are terrible. Bigger corporations swallowing up their competition, fewer choices for all of us, higher prices for all of us, and the continuation and expansion of the corruption. Of course, once a corporation reaches a certain size, employing large numbers of people, they will actually have even more of a wedge in dealing with government. Even their financial failure would then result in large enough job loss that government will "come to their rescue" with more favorable legislation or even financial "bailout" help.

Each government concession to lobbying also serves as precedent for more. If one proposal is granted, others will appear, wanting their "fair share". Every purported success with government privilege, touted publicly and paid for with the spoils, will encourage even more help next year. Legislators point with seeming pride to their "accomplishments", many of which were simply giving in to lobbying and perpetrating the massive scam. They claim "job creation", disregarding the simple fact that the new government-subsidized jobs took workers from other employment. They point to splendid new government-subsidized structures, disregarding the homes and businesses that were taken and destroyed to make room for the new government teat-suckers.

Government itself has expanded enormously. Ten years ago, several major corporations were the largest employers in our state. Now, our state government is the largest employer in Minnesota, with nearly 50,000 full-time employees.

Power is concentrating in government, and in large corporations that thrive by taking advantage of government power. It has become a bitter joke that the closer one works to government, the higher the income, the greater the personal benefits, and the sloppier the work becomes. Government power eliminates free market competition and substitutes competitive lobbying. The potential revenue from working as part of or in close connection with government naturally leads to bloated, inefficient results. Projects involving government have become synonymous with over-budget, wasteful, and corrupted ends that would quickly cause failure in a truly free and competitive market. As one small current example, the city of St. Paul is seeking "forgiveness" on loans from the state of Minnesota, used to build the RiverCentre Convention Center and Xcel Energy Center. It appears that St. Paul will succeed in paying back only $6.5 million of the original $48 million loan. The rest of the state will suck up the loss on what was touted as a grand investment for the future. While Minnesota citizens are losing their homes at a shameful rate, the state government will simply bail out the city's mess, and pass on even more taxes and debt to the citizenry.

The more power concentrates in government, the worse the results will become, yet the response of our politicians to bad results is to first blame any private sector involvement and then to concentrate even more power, regulation, and resources on what has now become a bigger problem. It is the epitome of a vicious cycle... if it doesn't work well, do even more of the same.

Libertarian Party Presidential candidate Harry Browne wrote "Why Government Doesn't Work", but the tragic reality is that it does work very well... for those involved in it. Politicians and all those who cater to or suck benefit from close association with government do benefit on a grand scale. The almost $109 million in income since 2000 of Bill and Hillary Clinton is but one example.

The benefits gained by those who are part of that government/industrial complex come at the expense of everything that once made our nation the envy of the world. We are witness to the strangulation of the once-awesome spirit of America. We are being beaten in competition with other nations, falling in literacy and educational capability, and have lost respect around the globe. Our currency is diminishing in value, our debt is being bought up by other nations, and we continue down the same destructive paths.

The American people, in desperation for change, are watching as the two major political parties respond to these disastrous results. Their response is to again offer far more of the same... even greater government power. "More" is the only answer those parties have... more money, more control, more promises, more programs... more government... and more of the same.

Make no mistake... more government will benefit those who are in government or eating from its trough, but it will continue the disintegration of our nation. I'm sorry to say that I think we may see the complete and utter collapse of America in my lifetime. I'm even sorrier to say that I really doubt that anything can stop it, or even slow it. Any chance of preventing collapse depends on the remaining wit and will of the American people, and I am no longer optimistic about either. Americans are not dumb, but we can be blind, deaf, and unthinking, and too lazy or distracted to do anything about it. We will be faced with an election where most will choose between two of the most pathetic candidates in history... two who will, without any doubt, make our problems even worse by doing STILL MORE of what got us here.