Gomery and the true source of corruption...

So now everyone is pretending to be shocked and horrified over the Gomery inquiry. Sum total misspent: $200 million – a drop in the bucket of State spending. Not a few years ago, an HRDC scandal topped $5 billion – naturally, the 200 million is getting more attention, since the math illiterates that State schools churn out probably think 200 million is more than only 5 billion.
Of course, everyone knows that the entire system is corrupt, but we love to focus on the party in power – thus maintaining the comforting illusion that somewhere out there, someone exists who can handle billions of dollars of scantily-documented taxpayer cash without becoming corrupted. Our general inability to think in terms of principles is also shown by the fact that when the Liberals made it legal to take taxpayer dollars to fund their party (i.e. through campaign contribution ‘reforms’), nary a voice was raised in protest. In other words, it is not the behaviour of those entangled in the sponsorship scandal that is objectionable, but the legality of that behaviour. If memory serves, this approach to law – that whatever the government makes legal, is right – got the Germans into significant trouble a couple of generations ago.

So now we are faced with three unpalatable choices. We have the power-hungry Liberals, utterly corrupt; we have the spend-happy NPD, utterly socialist – and we have the Progressive Conservatives, who are only fairly spend-happy, somewhat socialist – and very Christian. Thus it is now officially safe to predict the coming demise of our current form of mob-rule democracy. Like the German Weimar Republic of the 1930’s – and French Third Republic of the same decade – no government will now be able to hold on to power for more than a year or two before being consumed by the corruption that is already endemic to the system as a whole.

To anyone with even a rudimentary understanding of history, it is all grimly predictable. Once any government gains the power to tax income, State spending, debt and corruption always go through the roof. More and more parasites are drawn to the mountain of money the government guards. The simple greed of money-lust gives soon way to the more sinister corruption of the manipulation of State power to favour individual groups – farmers, unions and manufacturers, to name just three. Protective and biased legislation is passed. Taxes continue to rise. The economy begins to slow, causing more people to flock the relative safety of State payouts. Limiting State spending becomes almost impossible, since so many voters now depend on State largesse – in one form or another – to survive.

This all paralyses a sequence of individual governments, resulting in cynicism in both the general population and those in power. Knowing that proactive action is impossible, and that the system is doomed to failure, everyone at the top just grabs whatever money they can as fast as possible – which accelerates the coming collapse.

The relevant question is thus not whether our current democracy is doomed – or when – but rather: what do we want to come afterwards? Most failing societies take entirely the wrong approach, mistaking the collapse of mob-rule democracy for the failure of freedom, and thus fleeing into the false security of an authoritarian system. Those societies which flourish, however, recognise that State power – especially the brutality of the income tax – always leads to the collapse of the State – and, with clear eyes and strong arms, work to rebuild a new society free of such destructive tyrannies.