20A044 Creeps  by Jim Davies, 11/3/2020  

One recent evening a lady called. Her accent was Black and Southern, but I'm not skilled enough to pinpoint where exactly; she said my phone number had been picked at random, that she was conducting a health survey for my state, and asked if I'd mind answering some questions. She promised my time would help the state (government) do some good things about everyone's health.

Nothing is wrong with market surveys. An entrepreneur has an idea for a service or product, and before investing development capital he pays for information about how well it is likely to be received. The results may save him a bundle, if they show the demand is less than he expected; and if it's more than expected, they will help him make a bigger one.

But this wasn't an entrepreneur, figuring out how to minimize risk and maximize profits. This was the government, looking for ways to expand. If this survey reveals for example that many people don't get annual checkups because of lack of money, why, the government can step in and provide them - free! Never mind where the money comes from, it grows on trees. Isn't that a wonderful way of attracting votes, and creating more jobs in the Department of Health Services?

Of course it is. So money was stolen to pay this nice lady to conduct the survey, and its results will lead to more jobs in the government sector - requiring more money to be stolen to pay the salaries, and so the merry-go-round goes round. It's an instance of the Big Creep, of how governments use their powers to acquire yet more powers. A few do that suddenly with violence, but most do it as here, gradually with patience. Live frogs are best boiled gradually.

So far, so bad. But it gets - or could easily get - much worse. The surveyor uses only random phone numbers - fine. But it's a doddle to do a reverse phone number search, especially if you come to it with a government badge of some sort, so anyone in the state bureaucracy could put together a whole lot of detail about his name, address, SS#, drinking habits, suicide intentions and prostate condition, etc. Great grist for the planned, future Medical Dictatorship. To know its customer as well as it can is fine for a business; but government isn't a business. It's a system of domination, of rulers and ruled.

Of course, the nice Southern lady wouldn't do that. It would be a different Department. But if you want to know how the three levels of government crept from about 10% of the country's GDP in 1900 to about 50% today, the answer is what you've just read. And unless you stop it, it will get worse.

It won't be stopped by politicians, not even the better ones like Donald Trump. He has been trying to "drain the swamp" but anyone with half an eye can see how viciously the swamp has been striking back, even sucking him in. He's no libertarian (as I pointed out in 2016) but if he had been, the blowback would have been far more vicious yet. If it's to be done, it must be done by you.

The parasitic government sector has one critical vulnerability: labor. Without people working for it, it cannot function. Like everyone else it transfers work to computers when it can - and usually (the NSA excepted) it's slow and inefficient when doing so - but ultimately, it relies on people, and I think always will. So, to demolish it those employers have to be dissuaded from staying in their jobs. I can see no alternative. Can you? Let me know what it is, if you can.

Two resources are shown on the right of this page, to help that happen. One, to start people thinking, is the QuitGov site. The other is the blockbuster; nobody who graduates from the Freedom Academy will long remain in government employ. The sooner you use it, the sooner the job will be done.

Infected with CVD, thinking of voting today? Click to see why not.