I enjoyed that read. A different perspective. Yet I wonder. If a farmer grows a crop of corn, and has more corn than he/she needs to provide calories for family and livestock, and chooses to trade some of that corn for some cotton from the cotton farmer in order to make some cloths, what transaction has just taken place? Was it barter? Perhaps some would call it that. But, whatever you call it, it is the basis of commerce.
That basic system works fine until you consider all the farmers and ranchers and transporters and distributors of all of the produce of farming. How many eggs per bushel of corn, or pail of milk, or to transport the corn from one farm to the next? That can be a confusing, nearly impossible transaction stream, especially when you multiply it by a country of 350 million and a million products. The solution to making all this work is to assign each product a relative value to a consistent measure. That measure is called currency; dollars, yuan, pounds, euros.
Everything, including government, draws from that commerce stream. In the world you are either contributing to that production stream or somehow living off it. Government’s role is parasitic…though hopefully in a symbiotic way…providing protection / security. One of the biggest challenges that confront us is the size and cost of government. Government is the single largest employer in the US with something like 2.7 million civilian employees. This does not include non-civilians, such as those in the military. Government spends more than it brings in through taxation. Consider the US federal deficit as an example. $20 trillion! That’s something like $50,000 per every human being in the country. Now consider that every state also has a state deficit. The California State debt is said to be $1 trillion and growing. The same is true at the county level and the city level. All levels of government spend more than they take in. They want you to think of it like a home mortgage, but the difference is there is no tangible assets they can trade for corn. When you add up all the government debt, it works out to something like $70,000 for every person in the country. Just under $300,000 for a family of 4. This is government debt, but government has no resources other than us, so it is our debt.
Government is a huge burden and continues to get bigger no matter who is in office. Government does not produce any products, so they are not involved in the production side commerce. Government provides a (hopefully) symbiotic relationship with the people. But when you look at it’s tendency to drag all of us, and generations to come, further and further into debt, it has, in many ways, become a 4 pound tick on a five pound Chihuahua. A fragile symbiosis at best.
