Big Government Will Always Act Like Big Government And You Can’t Control It

Mandeville, LA – Exclusive Transcript – [r]epublicanism is a way of life, folks.  It’s not a fad; it’s not a trend.  Your forefathers practiced it, but alas, it seems just a bridge too far for the average hoi polloi American sheeple citizen these days.  We defer to Mordor on almost everything it seems.  As a matter of fact, we defer to it with such regularity, I often wonder why some people protest so mightily about it.  What’s the big deal?  Check out today’s transcript for the rest…

 

Begin Mike Church Show Transcript

Mike:  [r]epublicanism is a way of life, folks.  It’s not a fad; it’s not a trend.  Your forefathers practiced it, but alas, it seems just a bridge too far for the average hoi polloi American sheeple citizen these days.  We defer to Mordor on almost everything it seems.  As a matter of fact, we defer to it with such regularity, I often wonder why some people protest so mightily about it.  What’s the big deal?  You empower it with its omnipresent oppressing presence.  You defer to it and say that all of your rights come from it and they are all defended by it.  You say that everything under the sun is subjected to its oversight and overview.  You purport to say that there is little that it fails or cannot be relied upon to do.

Then when it does these things, [mocking] “Wait a minute, I didn’t mean that!” — “What did you mean?” — “Well, you can do that, but that’s just too expensive.” — “So you would accept the overreach, the usurpation of power if it were just a smaller usurpation?” — “That’s right.  We need Tea Party and government watchdog groups to get in there and make those things smaller.” — “So you’ll accept all those things, you just don’t want them in the size they currently are.  Do I have that right?”

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These things are incompatible, ladies and gentlemen.  Those of you that hold this schizophrenic point of view need to go bang your heads against the wall or go back and read some Jefferson and Madison and Taylor of Caroline.  If you don’t want to do that, go back a little further.  Go read some David Hume, Idea of a Perfect Commonwealth.  If you don’t want to do that, maybe go back and read some St. Thomas Aquinas and really get your head screwed on right.  You can’t have and demand of a government that oversees 310 million, you can’t ask it to do that and then be surprised when it has to erect such a gargantuan state in order to execute the mighty task that you have given it, then protest mightily against it when it seeks to discharge the duty that you have charged it with.

This is where I think part of the disconnect is.  Your average American sherson out there, the ones saying: I don’t much mind if they eavesdrop on me.  I don’t have anything to hide, so if they’re just listening to my calls, if they’re just cataloging where I am and taking the metadata, I don’t really have an issue or problem with that.  That’s not a big deal.  All they’re getting is metadata.  As I pointed out earlier in the program today, if you gather enough metadata, you can put a pretty accurate picture together of what someone is, who they fraternize with, and where they fraternize.  This is not hard to do…

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It seems to me that the sickness and the virus that has infected the body politic and the people writ large is that they expect that certain things are going to be executed on their behalf, and they’re comfortable with those things being executed on their behalf, but like most things in life, they like to complain about them when they’re not done perfectly.  If you want your navy to be a force for good across the entire known universe, if you believe that your air force ought to be stationed in Dubai, if you believe that your air force ought to be stationed in Saudi Arabia, Okinawa, Germany, Italy and everywhere else on the face of the planet, if you believe that your army ought to be stationed in all those places, and I mean army armed and ready, if you believe that there should be federal agents and agencies that are headquartered and stationed in all 50 states and in almost every county to oversee the production of agriculture, but you just don’t want it overseen to the level they’re overseeing it at, I would say you can’t have both.

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You cannot have that large of a state and then expect that you can micromanage it and that it can execute its tasks in a frugal manner.  Government is anything but frugal.  It is only frugal when it is constrained by a very active and alert citizenry that elects active and alert politicians to run it.  We don’t elect active and alert people very often these days.  I don’t know if you’re keeping score.  The fact that state legislatures and city and county legislatures and legislative bodies have experienced bankruptcies, are experiencing bankruptcies, are out of budget, are out of scale, can’t execute simple duties — let me give you a great example.

The city of New Orleans can’t run its own jail.  If you can’t run a jail, that means you can’t execute the laws and you cannot protect the citizenry.  The mayor in New Orleans, Mitch Landrieu, is begging the federal government to order, to have a judge order this thing called a consent decree.  What’s a consent decree?  That’s where the city agrees to be taken over by the federal government.  Then you’ll have federal marshals coming in and running the Orleans Parish prison, then running and supervision the NOPD, the New Orleans Police Department.  In what form of federalism do you find that?  [mocking] “Well, Mike, somebody’s gotta come in and help.”  No!  The citizens are supposed to do this.  We don’t even have citizens that are capable of guiding and directing our legislative bodies into compliance with reality.  Oh, but don’t worry, if we congregate together in enough tea parties, we can fix all this stuff.  No, we can’t, because we collectively think that these things are all to be done by the unibody, but the unicameral legislature whose tentacles spread all across the 50 states and the amber waves of fuel.

You can’t have it both ways.  Either you’re going to have a decentralized, very decentralized, rethought union where there is probably, if any power at all is concentrated in the center, then it is the power of a few enumerated things, namely to provide some form of common defense, to provide some form of a common currency, and to provide some form and protect some form of free trade and felicity among the states.  That’s about all you can expect of it.  Anything else, once it exceeds that, it’s going to grow because it is an organism just like any other.  Its survival is its paramount objective.  Because its survival is linked to how much it can extort from people that it’s purported to serve, then it is going to grow large and it is going to grow into an entity that is not going to serve the needs of the people that claim they want it to serve.

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Again, it seems to me that the national legislature is doing pretty much what the American sheeple demand that it do.  When they stop demanding that it do all these things is when possibly it can then be constrained.  Then it will become unnecessary.  It will become a relic of a bygone era.  When the Department of Education is actually eradicated, not managed and not reformed, when the Department of Energy is actually eradicated, transfer any nuclear authority they have — yes, I’m well aware I pronounce nuclear the way George W. Bush does, by the bye; I do it intentionally — transfer any nuclear supervisory authority that they have over bombs and weapons and munitions and what have you, transfer that to the army where it belongs, transfer that to the Department of Defense.  We could go through this whole exercise with Homeland Security.

Do you know that in our little hamlet here in Covington, Louisiana, there is a federal Department — or at least inspired by the federal government — of Homeland Insecurity?  There’s a Homeland Security building in the downtown hamlet of Covington, Louisiana.  I bet you probably have one in your town, too, and you don’t even know it.  With the wiretapping or the eavesdropping and the collection of phone records that we know has happened thanks to the whistleblower, the latest whistleblower, Edward Snowden, since we know that these activities are going on, what we should do, instead of complaining about them, is just ask them to be a little nicer to us.  [mocking] “Look, we know that you’re spying on us.  We just don’t want you to lie to us about it.  Just come clean and tell us all the things you’re doing because you have to protect us from Achmed the goat herder over in Afghanistan.  We need protection from people that are hiding out in caves and are making their way across sandy deserts right now.  Just don’t lie to us about it.  You want to tap my phone?  Fine, I don’t have anything to hide.  Go ahead and do it.”

For those of you that remain animated and angry and pissed off at the IRS and the Obama administration and the NSA and the CIA and all its other various attendant groups that make up the national security surveillance state, you should just get over it.  You should accept it as a condition of living in these United States with our empire the size that it is, and just go about your business, citizen.  Move along.  Stop complaining.  People say: Mike, how can we change?  Well, you’re not going to change it by believing that you can reform it because it’s going to resist every effort that you put into reforming it.  It’s not going to reform because it’s not in its interest to reform.  It is not in the interest of the people that are being patronized and are making trillions of dollars off of the system as it currently exists.

Do you not understand, do people not get that the federal government or an entity that spends $3.7 trillion has an awful lot of friends, too?  There are an awful lot of people that have their hands out.  They want their share of that $3.7 trillion and they don’t want to give it up.  They may be people that are road contractors.  They may be people, [mocking] “I gotta work in the USDA.”  You mean the State of Louisiana can’t inspect its own meat, or you can’t have a board that is hired by restaurants or paid for my consumers?  I want inspected meat.  We have the ABC Meat Inspection Agency.  Tort law would cover this.  You inspect meat and you say it’s good.  I bring it home and it’s not, then that’s on you.  My point is this can all be done privately, without unions or federal unions or state unions and all the other things that go along.  Maybe you do earn some kind of a pension or whatever from being a meat inspector.  You won’t earn it like you’re earning it working for the USDA.  How many have even considered when you go to the store what those USDA labels mean?  It means it’s inspected.  What does that mean?  It means it’s good.  Oh, is it?  Did the USDA inspect some of the meat that gets tainted and winds up on the shelves and gets served as not-properly-cooked hamburger and kills people?

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Until people are actually willing to deal with the size and the overreach and to break the monster up like any large monopoly must be broken up in order to restore some form of control — you can almost say you can control it through the price mechanism, but it wouldn’t work that way through government.  It kind of would work that way.  Some people are willing to do that.  I say that we should all just start talking about movies and beer and whiskey and golf and what have you, give up this pursuit of liberty and justice because we’re never going to attain it in our lifetime.  From where I sit, most people don’t really want it.  They claim that they do, they want to restore their freedoms and liberties, yet at every turn, when presented with the opportunity, they refuse to pull the trigger on it.  Well, then that one is on you.  The NSA existed before the Obama administration came along and it abused its powers under President Bush.  As the Newsweek magazine cover story from 1970 points out, the NSA was abusing its powers back when Nixon was president.  It was abusing its powers back when Eisenhower was president.  It goes all the way back to then.

Since we’ve become inure to this and immunized to it and seem not to care, as long as it’s not directly affecting us, then we should, for the benefit of all mankind that benefit from our magisterial government, just shut the hell up and accept it.  Stop complaining about it.  Maybe if we encouraged our federal overlords, maybe they’d do a better job.  Maybe if we gave them pep talks, maybe if we sent them Christmas gifts, maybe if we sent them Valentine’s Day cards they wouldn’t abuse us so much.  Has anyone ever thought of or tried sending strawberries or flowers or teddy bears to your favorite IRS agent on Valentine’s Day?  Well, have you?  You might bring a gift to your local butcher if you know it’s his birthday.  Why not your EPA inspector?  We should be thankful for our federal overlords who only have our health, wealth, safety, and pursuit of happiness as their motivational force behind all that they do.

End Mike Church Show Transcript

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