There is no such thing as ‘too big to fail.’
The British Empire failed, the Soviet Union failed and even the Roman Empire failed. Many politicians have tried to argue the opposite though: that some financial institutions are so big that their collapse would be catastrophic for the United States’ economy, and therefore the federal government must bail them out. This is horribly ironic.
Many politicians have argued that we should not allow financial institutions to become what they call ‘too big to fail,’ which is a phrase I find to be indefinable. The irony is that they are running the federal government. I’d imagine we could all agree that the collapse of our federal government would be much more catastrophic than the collapse of any of our financial institutions. Additionally, by bailing out financial institutions the federal government got bigger and ensured that if it were to collapse that it would be a more devastating affair. Anybody who says our federal government can’t fail doesn’t know their history very well.
The government is all about power and the creation of the phrase serves to expand that power. Under the guise of ‘too big to fail,’ federal officials have given huge sums of taxpayer money to financial institutions, which interestingly enough, an odd number of federal officials worked for these very same institutions prior to working in the administration. I do not appreciate my money being given away to private firms because of some big fear of failure. Here we see fear being used to justify the transfer of billions of dollars.
Another tactic the federal government uses for power is the guise of kindness or benevolence. For example, social security was setup to “help” seniors in their retirement. Social security however, will very likely not be around for our generation, and yet we’re going to have to pay into it. Social security was created back in 1935, and in 1965 the federal government set up Medicare, also to “help” seniors pay for medical care. Again, Medicare is broken – it is an unsustainable system and it is a failure. It is no less a Ponzi scheme than Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme; it’s actually much worse because it’s compulsory and done on a much larger scale.
A pattern begins to emerge here: the federal government time and time again has set up social programs that are failures. I think the way the government has treated the failed financial institutions shows how they want to be treated; even though many major government programs are failures, they think the federal government as it functions now should be kept going, despite the obvious fact that it is unsustainable in its current form. The federal government bailing out failed financial institutions is like one person who’s drowning in debt taking on more to help a friend who’s also in debt. As if that person can afford to help their friend though. When you’re drowning you need to save yourself first before you can rescue others. Besides, if the federal government really had our best interest at heart, they’d realize that a few financial institutions collapsing is not as painful as having social security, Medicare, Medicaid, etc. all collapse.
The federal government is the monster in the room – it’s eating up other people’s resources and wasting a lot of them along the way. I’d think even if personal liberty isn’t a huge deal to a person that they’d still see the enormity of the federal government and how unsustainable it is in its current form. Asking the federal government to take care of health insurance is analogous to somebody asking somebody who’s filing for bankruptcy for financial advice. That’s not exactly somebody who you want helping you with your finances, judging from how they’ve handled theirs. It’s also like keeping your money at a financial institution that has failed, been bailed out, but hasn’t changed their business practices. They’re likely to fail again, and you’re most likely going to lose your money.
More and more Americans are waking up to the insanity that is the unsustainable federal government. We need to change course soon or the future doesn’t look too bright.