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Redstate
Scotland and the end of centralization
By: John Hayward
September 18th, 2014
Mark Leonard at Reuters has some interesting thoughts about how the
Scottish independence vote could be “the canary in the independence
coal mine,” a harbinger of both statehood movements and political
trends in “many nations that do not face imminent break-up – from
America to Zambia.” He specifies four of those trends as a desire
for
self-government that trumps economic interests, resurgent nationalism
(which he stretches mightily to cast as part of the “progressive” quest
for “income equality”), the loss of influence by national elites, and
the death of nationhood.
Using nationalism to conceal dead-end flat-broke “progressive” policies
and trick people into voting for a socialist utopia is a strategy that
will have a short, unhappy life. It would be more accurate to say
that
the century-long push toward centralization is ending because it’s
literally bankrupt. Turning Scotland from a welfare state funded
by
British taxpayers into a welfare state funded by German taxpayers of
the European Union really isn’t much of a transformation. The
welfare
state is the problem, not who pays for it. Nobody can afford to
keep
“socialist utopias” floating.
The corrosive welfare state is a toxic byproduct of
centralization.
Relatively small groups of people don’t come up with lifelong “you
work, I eat” systems, with 90 cents of every dollar disappearing into
Big Government administrative overhead. One of the reasons
private
charities tend to be more efficient that government welfare programs is
simply that they’re smaller, with local people using tight budgets to
assist people they become personally familiar with. The
soul-deadening, human-capital-degrading nightmare of anonymous people
getting EBT-card refills from faceless bureaucrats who scarcely bother
to verify their paperwork is something that only endures on a large
scale.
That goes for the other side of the “socialist utopia” welfare system,
too. Only huge governments develop billion-dollar slush funds the
Ruling Class can use to pay off its favorite lobbyists and corporate
partners. Only centralization creates the weapons of
anti-competition
that allow absurdly inefficient government-business hybrids to
endure.
If people have a choice, they tend to take their business elsewhere –
something central planners find extremely frustrating. “Too Big
to
Fail” is the kind of problem that only money-is-no-object central
government could cook up.
When government goes big, arrangements that look like outrageous
corruption to voters in a smaller polity are inflated until they become
standard operating procedure… huge dirigibles of corruption that float
serenely overhead without anyone really noticing them. The sort
of
thing that will set county meetings and local editorial pages on fire
passes unnoticed in Washington, D.C.
For the rest of this article and more, go to Redstate
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