My favorite is the price increase/decrease chart that shows how heavily regulated prices "for the good of the people" in education and health care have exploded, while the cost for things not so regulated (TVs and computers) have decreased in price.
This may be a tangent but thinking about government spending reminded me that, in the life sciences, academic promotions are completely dependent upon obtaining government (mainly NIH) funding. If you don’t get big NIH grants, you can’t get tenure. You can’t get private venture funding -it has to be NIH. So this giant academic research system we have in this country is completely dependent on the government, by design. Not just public universities but the private ones too. Our scientific progress is designed to be tied to the government.
You've done a great job here summarizing one of my greatest lamentations regarding our current state of affairs. Contrary to early Americans' desire for minimal government intrusion and maximal liberty (which requires, by necessity, risk and personal responsibility), Americans today see government as the means by which to solve every life problem. This leads to loss of liberty and, in the end, tyranny. People need to wake up to the zero sum game of government vs. liberty. The founders leaned heavily on the side of liberty, but that balance that they struck has been long discarded in favor of a nanny state that has eroded our rights to the point that they are becoming near non-existent.
We have almost destroyed this country by "doing something."
Well said.
My favorite is the price increase/decrease chart that shows how heavily regulated prices "for the good of the people" in education and health care have exploded, while the cost for things not so regulated (TVs and computers) have decreased in price.
https://kottke.org/19/02/cheap-tvs-and-exorbitant-education-modern-america-in-one-chart
This may be a tangent but thinking about government spending reminded me that, in the life sciences, academic promotions are completely dependent upon obtaining government (mainly NIH) funding. If you don’t get big NIH grants, you can’t get tenure. You can’t get private venture funding -it has to be NIH. So this giant academic research system we have in this country is completely dependent on the government, by design. Not just public universities but the private ones too. Our scientific progress is designed to be tied to the government.
And, sure as the sun rises, people assert that absent government money, research would not happen. Quite the trick, that.
You've done a great job here summarizing one of my greatest lamentations regarding our current state of affairs. Contrary to early Americans' desire for minimal government intrusion and maximal liberty (which requires, by necessity, risk and personal responsibility), Americans today see government as the means by which to solve every life problem. This leads to loss of liberty and, in the end, tyranny. People need to wake up to the zero sum game of government vs. liberty. The founders leaned heavily on the side of liberty, but that balance that they struck has been long discarded in favor of a nanny state that has eroded our rights to the point that they are becoming near non-existent.