President Obama wants to dispense with prohibitions on government spending taxpayers' money to lobby for bigger government. Stephen DeMaura of the Washington Times:
In his 2013 budget proposal, President Obama erased three critical anti-lobbying provisions that protect taxpayers from funding their own tax increases. Without this language, the federal government can more easily use our tax dollars to pay local governments and third-party groups to hire lobbyists, advocate publicly for a bill that will increase taxes, impose more government oversight and stifle individual freedoms, using such tools as television and radio advertising, pamphlets, and presentations.
Government agencies have already found loopholes in existing law that allow for taxpayer-funded lobbyists, but removing the provisions as Mr. Obama's 2013 budget does only gives an endorsement of such manipulative tactics.
So government takes our money and uses it to bend the legislature toward enlarging itself, devouring more and more of the people's income. As the biggest special interest of all, government can have its way with the legislature, because our system responds to lobbying. That's why the lobbying industry has grown so explosively, in parallel with the growth of government. But government playing the game changes the nature of the game.
The specter of a parasite devouring its host suggests itself at the idea of government endlessly taxing, propagandizing, and influence-peddling so as to consume an ever-greater share of the vestigial private economy.
When that economy finally collapses entirely, all that is left is the state. There is a branch of the romantic left which sees this as a way to bust out capitalism, finally validating Marx's prophecy that a free market economy destroys itself because of internal contradictions. If capitalism stubbornly self-corrects and it requires government control send the equilibrating mechanisms into collapse, so be it. A revolution is not a dinner party.
What the left fails to realize that the parasite dies along with its host. That is the real contradiction.
Hat tip: Ed Lasky
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