As we prepare, much too soon, to launch into the 2012 presidential and gubernatorial campaigns, I would offer a word of caution about the phrase that is going to dominate this circus — big government.
Government exists to protect the rest of us from the worst of us. The first government was a lynch mob that killed a cave marauder and we have been laboring to refine the process, with varying degrees of success, ever since.
Granted, the current arrangement has developed some serious malignancies over time from the ministrations of some of the aforementioned worst, but to try to put it right with a wholesale butchery of the so-called big government without first purging the process of influence by even more of those worst is the very essence of throwing the baby out with the bath water.
This idea was born in the hearts of a whole army of those worsts in an effort to stop the big government protectors from cutting into their profits with regulations and controls on their harmful and even deadly health and safety policies and practices.
We mustn’t allow America’s long history of protection from these predators to make us naive about how awfully we would suffer without it. The nightly news will tell you how relentlessly they exploit every loophole in what protections we do have. We mustn’t give them more.
Fixing the government will be a big job, but just slashing at it is not the answer.
Harold R. Pettus
Everett
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