(Palm-Print
Photo by Edward F. Palm)

About Me

My photo
Forest, Virginia, United States
A long time ago, my sophomore English teacher, Father William Campbell, saw something in my writing and predicted that I would someday become a newspaper columnist. He suggested the perfect title for my column--"Leaves of the Palm." Now that I have a little extra time on my hands I've decided to put Father Campbell's prediction to the test. I'm going to start using this blog site not just to reprint opinion pieces I've published elsewhere but to try to get more of my ideas and opinions out there. Feedback is welcome. To find out more about me, please check out my Web site: www.EdwardFPalm.com (Click on any of the photos below for an enlarged view.)

Wednesday, September 14, 2011

The Mantra of the Far Right

An opponent of a proposed veterans’ services levy here in Kitsap County has been quoted as saying this:  "We do not need continued government support to do what we need to do in our lives. . . .What we need is for government to get the hell out of our way." 
            I’m getting really tired of hearing variations on the Reaganesque mantra that “government is not the solution to our problems; government is the problem.”  It was more rhetorical than real--just a clever sound bite--when Reagan first uttered it, and it is less than helpful today.  To be sure, we need to root out fraud, waste, and abuse at all levels of government.  But the fact remains that there are some needs that only government can meet.  There are other needs that government has a moral obligation to meet.  Given that we have relegated the burden of national defense to less than one percent of our population, the obligation is undeniable, and only government has the mechanisms to ensure a  consistent, widespread approach to meeting the need. I support the levy.   
            And as for our country at large, clever sound bites—especially the mantras of ideologues—are not the solution to our problems.  --EFP       

1 comment:

Fortunateson said...

Well said. I wrote a positio paper based on the same thread. I called it "The Myth of the Founder" and it dealt with what the corporate founder espoused and practiced. And it appeared that the farther away we got from the founder they tended to assume mythical proportion. Case in point being Wal Mart. "This would never when Sam Walton was alive" was a phrase uttered by a disgruntled employee who would the paraphrase a pithy Waltonesque quote. My research drew two conclusions. That disgruntled employee did not work in the Walton era 54% of the time. Secondly the statement credited to Walton was,upon serious scrutiny, a bastardized version taken out of context and applied as needed to a current ill.