You were very smart.   You bought a home using the best wisdom you had learned over the years.   You bought a house you could afford and you put 10+% down.   You could have gone for more and put just 3%, 5% or whatever down on it but you wouldn't have been able to sleep at night.   You could have used one of those fancy mortgages which don't call for principal payments or which have an adjustable rate - in other words a low rate today and perhaps a high one tomorrow - but you wanted stability.   You could have refinanced your conventional 15 or 30 year fixed rate mortgage and taken out a couple tens or a hundred thousand to finance some new cars, a "media room," maybe some exotic vacations, etc. but you wanted to eventually pay the darn thing off before your life insurance is paid out to your spouse.   You wanted stability in your financial situation so you could focus on saving for retirement or the kids' college.   You played it conservatively and are unsure what all the hubbub is about a mortgage crisis or all those foreclosures.   But your intelligence, your frugsality, your fical conservativism isn't going to help you now.   You are going to help pay for all those overly aggressive people and businesses.   This is your tax dollars at work.

The trouble is our government cannot do the smart little things.   It cannot sensibly regulate the important little things with clear, concise legislative language.   That's just not enough work for a large body of human beings.   Instead it must allow or even create scenarios which are inherently dangerous for large numbers of poor, down-trodden citizens so it can react to crises created thereby and form new bodies which require funding and patronage staffing.   Thus it grows bigger and bigger until most of us work mostly to support the machine.   And that's where we are today.

The government grew just a little larger yet again today.   It will grow again tomorrow.   The organism of government continues to thrive, in good times and bad.   It is a relatively slow-growing, insidious cancer that will eventually choke the life out of all of us.

Labels: Big Government