An article at CATO Institute has turned me onto an article written by Peter Drucker back in the 1960s, about the problems of government being too big and unwieldy.
First, who is Peter Drucker? He is the economic genius on concepts like “Total Quality Management” and “Management by Wandering Around”. He attempted to teach his concepts to the American auto companies in the late 1950s and 1960s, but was ignored by the behemoths that had no real competition. He then took his concepts to Japan, which was only creating rice burners. Thanks to Peter Drucker, in less than a decade, Japan went from cheap cars and toys, to the best quality one could find anywhere. It led to Chrysler’s bankruptcy in the early 1980s, and forced Ford and GM to infuse quality into their companies. Every great company in the world today has been influenced by Peter Drucker.
In his article, Drucker discusses not only American government, but attempts by other governments to try and defeat economic malaise and recession, regulate economies, etc. And in almost every instance, government has botched things. Government can do two things well, according to Peter Drucker: wage war and inflate currency.
I’ll let you read Drucker’s article and the CATO article for the points they make, but I wanted to note how amazing Drucker’s comments are today in 2013. The things that concerned him 50 years ago are still true today. When he noted, “who really believes that the War on Poverty will vanquish poverty in cities?”, we must admit that LBJ’s war is a failure. There are more people on Food Stamps today than at any other time in history.
Fifty years ago, Drucker stated that the Tsar’s secret police “did not go in for the security investigations we now take for granted.” Here we are at an even more precarious place with the NSA stealing information from Google, Germany’s Prime Minister Angela Merkel, and even the Papal elections!
And if Drucker was critical of the national healthcare of Great Britain (he was), imagine what he must think about the monstrosity we call Obamacare! Just how will it make lives better, when it has begun by making millions of lives worse? How about the unfunded mandates in Medicare and Medicaid, which will only get worse as more people are moved onto those programs? If you think the current $17 Trillion deficit is huge, well you ain’t seen nothing yet!
Though we plow billions into the Dept of Education (founded by Jimmy Carter), the ability of students to read and do arithmetic has not improved any in over 30 years. Can we just do what we were doing three decades ago and stop spending the wasted money, as it hasn’t made a difference?
The only solution to most of our problems is to get our people off the welfare hog’s teat, and back to caring for themselves and others in their own communities. Then, we must slash federal government down by 2/3 or more. Education, welfare, and most other issues can be handled better on the state and local levels, as they were for the first half of this nation’s existence.
As noted by CATO, while they look at it from a freedom perspective, Drucker looked at the economic side of it. And big government cannot do what it consistently tries to claim it can. The Soviets could not do it. The Communist Chinese had to move to a capitalist system with more freedom. Some European nations are moving away from their form of socialism and towards private enterprise. Greece, Ireland, Spain, Italy, Portugal and other nations are struggling with bankruptcy from their big government experiments. Now, we see the United States falling from its perch as the #1 nation on earth, because of big government.
Sad that even from the Drucker’s perspective from 50 years ago, we still cannot break free from the government candy store, which is not only rotting our teeth, but rotting our souls as well.