DC Rioters Wanting Bigger Government are Misdirecting Their Anger

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Though he was a minor Beatle, he made a profound statement. Ringo Star was once quoted saying, "Anything the government touches, turns to crap." Ringo was absolutely right when he said that.

Thousands of politically motivated rioters have been out causing chaos, seemingly directing their anger at corporations. They have been seen smashing store windows, setting cars on fire, turning over mailboxes and dragging them in the street. They are angry that corporations are too successful and so they want to harm those businesses with their petty acts of vandalism.

What do these rioters want? They think corporations make too much money and the government should force them to give more of their money to them so that wealth can be spread around society more fairly. Essentially, they want more government regulations and taxes and they don't believe Donald Trump will do that for them so they are letting the world know that.

Their anger is misplaced. Instead of pushing the government to pass more regulations and more taxation of those that have things, they should be pushing for the size of government to shrink. The problem is government is far to big and what government really does is it removes wealth from society and drags it down.

The government doesn't have any wealth of its own. The only way the government accumulates wealth is through direct taxation of its citizens or through the hidden inflation tax known as printing money, or as modern economists like to call it quantitative easing. Those are the only two sources of income for the government.

Both of which are harmful to productive, hard working citizens. The government ends up waisting a large portion of those funds on bureaucratic and political processes before it ends up helping anyone.

When one dollar is stolen from a hard working person, who spent their time producing something of value that benefits the lives of other people, that is one dollar that is removed from productive means in society and now is in the hands of unproductive hands that do not produce any wealth of its own.

Countless people have to take their portion of that one dollar before the school teacher down the street gets any of it. 

All the people at the IRS and their attorneys have to get paid, then it goes to the treasury and those people have to get paid, Congress have to get paid while they argue about some new spending bill, their aids have to get paid, the people who maintain the government buildings have to get paid, the people in all of the regional government offices have to get paid. 

Then finally a school teacher gets 50 cents of that dollar after it works its way through the government mess of unproductive people.

All of these people that touched that dollar who get a portion of it all have frictional jobs that produce no value to society whatsoever; they don't produce anything that anyone would buy. If those people didn't work for the government and actually worked to produce valuable things for society, the world would be in a far better state.

The government produces misery in that it takes away from the productive resources in society and puts it in the hands of unproductive people. In other words, the government makes society less productive.

Many people on the left ideological spectrum (liberals) always focus on what other people are doing. When they see someone making a lot of money, they claim that person shouldn't make so much money, they should "spread the wealth around." Instead, they should be praising that individual, learning from them and trying to replicate their success. 

Focus on yourself, learn from others successes and mistakes, but who cares how much everyone else is making, so long as they aren't getting rich as a result of government intervention, then they are a net positive for society. Free market capitalists and fiscal conservatives understand this and we applaud them for it.

The bigger government gets, the less productive society becomes.

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- Ronald Reagan