The instance of government as your dog

The pursuit of happiness, as subjectively defined as possible, seems like a valid enough reason for this write up. Working for wages and then misspending it on black holes for investments.. that seems to be the lot for the middle class all over the world. You work hard; believing that circumstances will change for the better just because you will earn more and then instinctively know what to do with the money. Well you don't.

Happiness does not come from building an ivory tower for you in the middle of squalor. It comes from improving the environment around you so that the desperate and the poor don't come barging through your ivory gate for crumbs and smashing your chandeliers in the process. You can't change the world but, for prudence sake, you should improve your immediate surroundings. In short, it is useful to band together in communities to work for the common good.

Its hard to argue with the government's role as a collective pool of resources and the disseminator of it. You can't build the road from your house to your place of work by yourself. So it makes sense to join hands with other people who will use the same road. And then there are other common roads that you should not build alone. And hospitals. And schools, And parks. And law enforcement and the army.

But how far should it go? How deep do you want your tax pool to be? Before answering that, there is a little matter of what is your relationship with this tax collector/disseminator..

Because of certain histories of despotic and/or corrupt governments, people tend to think of the state as the Other. Governments have become so powerful after hoarding resources, that they have acquired characteristics that seem foreign to the person who voted and funded for them. The fear of the IRS and the law enforcement is one example. But make no mistake about it. A representative government is yours to elect and recall and fund and starve. There is no Us and Them. It is all us. It is our own responsibility to be vigilant and vocal about our own rights. More often than not, people are distracted by sports, entertainment and social chatter to pay attention to what elected representatives are doing or where their tax money is going. People who pay attention, carve out their piece of the pie while others are left holding the bag.

In the way of a caveat, it would be fair to mention that people who have not paid into the system, have no business benefiting from the dissemination of resources. They may have rights as guests but any appeal for free-loading must be rejected as a move for our own self-preservation.

Now think about acquiring a dog that is of some benefit to you. A big dog like Saint Barnard might be suitable for showing off but think about the cost of feeding and cleaning after it. For this dog to be functional or even move a muscle, a lot more food needs to be fed to compare to a smaller dog. Not to mention the possibility of it getting the idea that it might be the alpha dog in your household. A smaller dog would be easier to straighten out than, say, an aggressive Great Dane. And even at times of pleasant excitement, a big dog tends to overturn furniture and cause greater havoc than a scurrying poodle. Even though they say that it is not the size of the dog in the fight, but the size of the fight in the dog.., an aggressive dog which happens to be big, can get into a lot of unnecessary fights with the neighborhood dogs than a smaller one who may succumb to injuries way sooner.

Not to belabor the point, a government which has been overfed on tax dollars and/or been feeding off other dogs' chow by virtue of its size, is a liability for its contributors. The extra feed required to move the bureaucracy, the mess it can make by virtue of the grand projects that it dares to undertake.. the similarities are endless. The shenanigans of FBI in monitoring citizens are a classic example of the alpha dog mentality. And then there is the abundance of money that deludes big governments into pushing grand scale wars onto tax payers. The worst part is, you can't straighten out the big government easily. They have a lot more resources to fight changes and build the case for their crimes.

Compare this to the opposite case of a little dog that is dependent on the well wishes of its owner. It wants to please its owner because it knows that it can't go elsewhere. And if the dog does its job (whatever that might be), why would we not feed and care for it? We do not want to under feed the dog just so we can save some money. A healthy but still a small dog can go about its business without getting sick or needing constant attention.

However, there is the problem of too small a dog which might be bullied around in the neighborhood. The one that cannot do its essential job of fetching that ball in the open park because it is afraid of other dogs in the vicinity. Well, as they say it is the fight in the dog.. If you feed your small government enough in the fewer but critical areas it should handle, then the ball will come back to you. The key is not to over feed the dog so that it gains weight in fat, but enough so that it holds its own. Another situation that may arise in case of an underfed Basset Hound for example, is that they have been known to guide intruders and thieves into the house for a reward in food. Accordingly, no government should be starved to the degree that it panders to the rewards and interests of outside agencies.

The point of comparing governments and dogs is to emphasize its ownership by the people who feed it. It is desirable to have a government/dog for a number of reasons. It can be beneficial for the collective good while it can wreak havoc if its overfed or allowed to mooch off outside its borders to only bark back at the owners with added strength. A too lean a dog might be too weak to carry out its basic duties and would be vulnerable to outside influences. The key therefore, is to strike a balance in which, for the development of further projects for the common good, private enterprises can be utilized. However, these private agencies cannot grow to be bigger than the dog that has to keep an eye on the cats, fish and sparrows which may come into the equation for the sake of serving the common good. A strong watchdog program by the government is what is being advocated here.