Meddlesome Government Creates Problems It Cannot Solve

Interesting article, sadly the author labors under the delusion that governments can and will do these sorts of things:
We must stop glorifying intelligence and treating our society as a playground for the smart minority. We should instead begin shaping our economy, our schools, even our culture with an eye to the abilities and needs of the majority, and to the full range of human capacity.

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/07/the-war-on-stupid-people/485618/

Part of the war on the poor is how expensive our government has made it to employ folks - less productive people can't overcome their lack of productivity enough to be profitable to hire.  So many things legislated to help the poor and the "working class" are working against both.

How Much Did We Spend? We Don't Know

Pay errors are part of a larger phenomenon that Reuters will explore in a series of articles: the Defense Department's endemic failure to keep track of its money - how much it has, how much it pays out and how much is lost or stolen.

The department's authorized 2013 budget, after sequester, totals $565.8 billion - by far the largest chunk of the annual federal budget approved by Congress. Yet the Pentagon is literally unable to account for itself. As proof, consider that a law in effect since 1992 requires annual audits of all federal agencies - and the Pentagon alone has never complied. It annually reports to Congress that its books are in such disarray that an audit is impossible.

In this series, Reuters will delve into how an organization that fields the most sophisticated technology in the world to fight wars and spy on enemies has come to rely on an accounting system of antiquated, error-prone computers; how these thousands of duplicative and inefficient systems cost billions of dollars to staff and maintain; how efforts to replace these systems with better ones have ended in costly failures; and how it all adds up to billions of taxpayer dollars a year in losses to mismanagement, theft and fraud.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/07/09/us-usa-pentagon-payerrors-special-report-idUSBRE96818I20130709

Unbelievable.

Reforming What?

Reforming everything they ever F'ed up in the first place!

"Some of government's accomplishments cited in these books bring to mind Foundation for Economic Education president Lawrence Reed's point: "Have you ever noticed how statists are constantly 'reforming' their own handiwork? Education reform. Health-care reform. Welfare reform. Tax reform. The very fact that they're always busy 'reforming' is an implicit admission that they didn't get it right the first 50 times."  So government is hailed for ending slavery and Jim Crow, but the long government enforcement of those repressive laws is passed over. In the last chapter of To Promote the General Welfare, Paul Light of New York University identifies the federal government's greatest accomplishments from 1945 to 2000. Several actually involve lifting the burden or reducing the power of government-devolving responsibility to the states, freeing trade, limiting nuclear weapons, reforming government operations, making government more transparent, deregulating sectors of the economy, reforming welfare, cutting taxes, even restraining spending. It's hardly a triumph of big government for government to correct its longstanding errors."

http://reason.com/archives/2012/10/14/the-empty-case-for-big-government/
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