Anti-Private Sector-itis

There’s a new disease sweeping this country, and I have given it a name: anti-private-sector-itis. What is this horrible affliction affecting 60% of Americans? It is this strange, wrong-headed belief that everything should be publically funded, that all private industry is intrinsically bad, and that if you give the government control, things will get better.

Of course, after 8 years of failing grades in a public school that failed me, I became an A student in the challenging world of private school, where the government didn’t dictate what I learned. After years as a diligent worker in the private industry, I’m frustrated by the “slack off or be the office work horse while the rest of us slack off” public sector job that I have. I hate watching my tax dollars go to people who don’t deserve them, which decreases my ability to make charitable contributions to organizations who help the truly needy!

I’m tired of congress being in debt and solving the debt problem by creating more debt.

Yes, the private sector — by which most people mean Wall Street and the housing market — crapped out on us. But it was overinflated. We should not have been getting 15 and 20% returns annually, but that’s what many people in the market were getting because it was all artificial. It was inflated because the government gave mortgage securities incentives to inflate the numbers by giving ridiculous mortgages to those who couldn’t afford them and by constantly drilling home the message that Everyone Deserves a House. If you ever subscribed to the David Bach podcast, you’d have heard the sponsor, Wells Fargo, talk about The Great American Homeowner Challenge — the goal to put all Americans in a house of their own.

But guess what — land ownership is not a right, it’s a privilege. Yes, I have the right to own the property I buy with the money I earn, which I have the right to keep and spend as I so see fit. No, I am not entitled, by virtue of being born in the United States, to a house. No, I’m not even entitled to a home. I’m entitled to work my ass off to get to where I need to in this lifetime.

Of course, that’s not a warm and fuzzy thing to say. It’s much easier — and allows most to sleep better at night — to say that it was private industry who failed the people. It wasn’t. It was your government and the people who thought “This bank is going to give me $300,000 when I only make 30,000 a year and give me thirty years to pay it off? How can I go wrong?” The government pushed, coerced, and outright bribed banks to make loans available to the lowest, most impoverished and undereducated people imaginable. People who couldn’t just leave public school for the greener pastures of private school, as I did, so that their lack of understanding about interest and how someone on $30k can’t buy $300K of house is a direct result of shitty government-funded, government-sanctioned education.

This crashed stock market has the government’s fingerprints all over it, and they’re using your hard-earned money to cover it up. And you’re letting them, people!

The private sector corrupted and failed not because the government is intrinsically good or that private industry is intrinsically bad. It wasn’t a lack of government oversight that caused us to implode but a lack of individual oversight and personal responsibility, because we expect the government to do all of our thinking for us. And yet, when the government does just that — as with the recent lead testing laws for toys — people balk and bitch that it’s not fair, that it’s poorly thought through.

Newsflash: EVERYTHING THE GOVERNMENT DOES IS POORLY THOUGHT THROUGH.

Americans have become lazy. They expect the government to run their affairs and police their lives in ways that make it easier to enroll Jr. in five different after school activities because now you have time. Why pay attention to your investments: the government has the SEC for that. Why stop shopping at Walmart due to unfair labor practices and defective merchandise: the government has the FTC for that. Read about the medicine you’re taking or get a second opinion? Why bother when the FDA will tell you what to put in your body? Ditto for paying attention to dieticians and personal trainers when there’s a US government approved food pyramid that tells you what is (ketchup) or isn’t a vegetable! And rather than explain to Jr. what a breast or nipple is (a food delivery system for newborns), just bitch to the FCC if one shows up for three seconds during the Super Bowl. After all, it’s the job of Hollywood and The Government to raise your kid, not yours.