Government is the problem, not the answer. These words of wisdom from Ronald Reagan perfectly frame our current sad state of affairs where we look to the federal government for the answers to life's little hurdles. Unfortunately, the government intentionally creates many of those emergencies so that the government can be the immediate bureaucratic solution.
The Coronaphobia (COVID-19) is the perfect example. Government entities funded the research that created the virus and then all levels of government went to great lengths to regulate our behavior around the problem they helped facilitate. They quickly discovered that a "health emergency" was the gift that kept on giving command and control.
They kept extending and expanding that emergency status in order to maintain the power of the purse which then freed up billions of tax dollars used by their propagandists to manipulate and regulate our fears through mask mandates, essential business designations, school closures and economic lockdowns - none of which solved the problem they created.
The Christmas week "weather emergency" is another example of how everyone looks to the government for solutions. The complicit liberal media poured on incessant coverage of the severe winter storm implying that the government should be responsible not only for the climate change that they said caused the artic bomb, but also for untold amounts of tax dollars that should be spent to fix the weather related airlines mismanagement problems across the country.
They trot out the imminently unqualified Secretary of Transportation with mindless sound bites about the need for a federal investigation into Southwest Airlines. No attention was paid to the role of the government backed flight attendants' and pilots' unions being directly responsible for thousands of cancelled flights. Mr. Secretary took the stage to call for the ubiquitous federal takeover of the airlines. How soon they forget the outcome of the U.S. Postal Service takeover.
When baby formula fell victim to government induced supply chain delays, the clamor for a federal solution was amplified far and wide. America used to be able to handle these minor disruptions without the constant call for government intervention. The "baby formula emergency" fortunately found its solution in free market supply and demand.
The "fossil fuel emergency" is a government endorsed policy calling for the replacement of fossil fuels with wind, solar, methane, and other low volume, high cost energy solutions that cannot possibly fuel the Western economy that supports the world.
Fossil fuel energy independence is the capitalist solution that has enabled the world to feed, care for and lift out of poverty over 6 billion people. Now the government wants to shut down this free market miracle with a pervasive societal conversion to untested and inadequate renewable technologies.
Every day brings a new government emergency crying wolf with problems they create and, according to one of their experts, only they can solve. Government regulation is overwhelming - from our bathrooms to our board rooms. It fosters our widespread discouragement and the resulting complacency from a death by a thousand paper cuts.
State legislatures, county commissioners, town councils, school boards and homeowner associations can no longer abdicate their responsibility for local problem solving over to the feds. We must heed Thomas Jefferson's advice that the best government is the one closest to the people and the one that governs least.