The 10 Commandments of Government by Director Blue

Doug Ross has submitted for your review the following “commandments” of government. He could have said “operating system” or some other metaphor, but the word commandment does express both the quasi-religious nature of these rules, and the failure to heed them which indeed brings down the wrath of the State on your puny head.

For a much longer but equally on-target explanation (including a forecast) you would do well to get a copy of Gregory Copley’s book:

Copley doesn’t offer solutions, but his naming of the various problems we will face goes a long way toward aiding us in figuring out what to do while we wait. Let’s just say the more skills in your tool box, the better. And community will become increasingly important. Fragile, but necessary.

Our book budget is nil, but this one was too important not to buy. An atlas would help in your journey through Mr. Copley’s future. See the geo in front of the politics in the title? He really means it.

Meanwhile, here we are in Geenormous Government Land. Might as well read the rules to see if we can stay out of jail. That is becoming the unintended destination for lots of folks who weren’t planning to go there.

What follows is Director Blue’s Commandments and Dymphna’s amendments. Please feel free to add yours in the comments. In fact, if you can think of further commandments, let us know.

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I Generally speaking, government always grows — it never shrinks — whether times are good or bad.

The growth in good times is incremental. In bad times, it surges, tumors sprouting everywhere. Sometimes it fabricates “bad times” so it can go to war against these dangers — e.g., the Wars on poverty (or Poverty) and drugs and failing schools. Government loves wars.

II In each area it purports to “assist”, government attempts to replace individual decision-making with central planning.

Those ‘attempts’ at ‘assisting’ become evermore insistent and evermore umm…embracing. People are learning not to make frontal conflicts but instead to quietly build work-arounds. Homeschooling is one of those. However, it has been so successful it may well become illegal so people need to think ahead, especially where their children are concerned.

We have received distraught emails from shattered Norwegian parents who watch their children being brain-washed. That doesn’t mean there aren’t lots of parents in Norway who love their children’s school. But that’s not a universal love in Norway — we’ve also heard from grown-ups who survived the system and carry the scars. That’s what happens in totalitarian democracies.

Soon you will see lots more cases of “democracy” in scare quotes. People in many countries, including the U.S. republic, are beginning to grasp the farce of an electoral process in which the candidates on offer are the lowest common denominator results of crony, kleptocratic politics. They have nothing to add to the common weal but lots of ideas on what they plan to take from it during their “turn”.

III In order to implement its grand central plans and solidify its power, government must take from one citizen to give to another; this is, in effect, lawful theft.

And boy does it make the victims of these perennial robberies mad! Despite Obama’s transparent obsession with making things “fair” — a fixed game if ever there was one — his anger at rich white people — even just regular old white people like his granny — shines through each pronouncement. The man has done much damage to race relations in this country; it will take a wise saint to help us heal.

“Fairness” must always be founded on justice. When it is capricious or backward-looking, it becomes a dangerous weapon.

IV No matter how many times central planning fails, the self-appointed masterminds in government assert that “this time is different” and that with only a few tweaks and more money, their delusional plans will succeed.

Hahahahah. Can you say ObamaCare? No Child Left Behind? They’re tweaking like crazy and it will never ever be fixed. It’s a con and the American people are the unwilling suckers. As in ‘it sucks to be us’. If ObamaCare were real, all the Congress klepts would be in on it.

V Because it uses funds confiscated from taxpayers, self-restraint is no obstacle to government’s ambitions.

They have become increasingly gluttonous and greedy. They don’t even bother to hide it anymore — witness Nancy Pelosi and her deluxe private flights home to California, with the tab picked up by the taxpayer victims. Or the excesses of the IRS’ parties. Weren’t they the agency who went to Las Vegas?

VI Its fundamental misunderstanding of human nature notwithstanding, government must claim to grant “rights”, which require it steal the labors of one citizen to give to another (such as food, shelter, employment, and health care).

We met once with our FORMER Congressional representative — a Yale lawyer who lived off the fat of the land of George Soros — and that personage had no idea that our rights were “inalienable”. There’s a video of him somewhere on You Tube warning Americans that they needed to stop him and other members of Congress. You can bet there are dozens just as ignorant as he wandering the halls.

VII No matter how widespread the harm it causes, government will never provide an honest and historical accounting — a report card — of its failures.

That’s inherent. It’s a feature, not a bug. But the accounting grows more distorted and fallacious the longer it goes on. Another feature is eventual failure of the machine. Which is why no one who could do anything ever would.

VIII As more individuals and families are harmed by the failures of central planning, government must find suitable scapegoats, must lie to do so, and therefore must also repress dissent.

That’s how “democracies” and “republics” become totalitarian. America is just one of many Western countries living that reality. Some escape — perhaps Denmark has? Though it has its own scare stories burdened as it is with the tumorous political correctness that grows opportunistically all over the West. So never mind, Denmark — but you’re close!

IX In order to build its network of redistribution and grow a culture of dependency on its services, government must inevitably undermine the family unit, religion, and the notion of God-given rights in order to cow, bribe, or intimidate its citizens.

And so it beavers away at our foundation. The Soviets knew all this and they did it effectively. The problem was they also killed their economy. We didn’t “destroy” the USSR; its command economy did it in. That may be an inescapable end for us, too. We’re well along on the road to hell, paved as it is with those many unintended consequences of the Brave New World. We’ll just have to see what happens to us…after. Will we also end up overrun with alcoholics and plutocrats? Or, having the memory of a robust middle class in our DNA (something Mother Russia never had), will we have pockets of normalcy amidst the ruins? It’s too early to tell.

X As government grows ever more powerful, it must also become increasingly oppressive through compulsion and force. To do otherwise would mean government must shrink, and this it cannot do.

But it can shatter and self-destruct even as it continues to squeeze the necks of the golden geese taxpayers. Look again at the ending of the Soviet Union. They managed to meltdown without setting off a nuclear mess. May we be so lucky.

What Director Blue has described in #10 needs a coda: there are some entities who are too big NOT to fail.

What counts is how we fail. And that’s the unknown, isn’t it?

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I left a comment on Director Blue’s place in answer to another reader who said it was a mistake to think of government as an entity, that it was individuals making decisions and NOT a machine.

Here is my answer:

As much as I would like to agree with you, indio007, there is a critical point when those well-intentioned souls who serve the people morph into a bureaucracy whose function is to preserve itself. Read Max Weber for the details.

If what you say were true, then with each new administration, there would be a 100% turnover of employees in the agencies tasked with serving us…

Ain’t gonna happen. What will happen is the erosion of the center as more and more people turn away from the Monster Machine.

“We need to go after individuals for malfeasance” reads well on paper. The implementation has some glitches. It is no longer possible to impeach a president, no matter what he does or fails to do. Clinton proved that. Even though he lost his license to practice law after he left office…

Now pile on, y’all.

28 thoughts on “The 10 Commandments of Government by Director Blue

  1. A few additions to a fine article:

    Commandment IV: seems to be about domestic interventionism (or central planning, indeed). I’d like to add that the very same goes for foreign interventionism, i.e. foreign “aid”. The same excuses apply: “This time it’s gonna be different; we’ve got better plans; we give the money to countries where its leader doesn’t ya know.. eat people” 😉

    Commandment V: entirely correct about taxes of course (legalized theft, backed up by threats of violence). With regard to confiscation, I’d like to stress that the preferred mode is not so much the overt but the covert taxation, by means of manipulating (inflating) the money supply through the Federal Reserve. Until now, it has been far easier to just “print up” the money to fund all kind of interventionist scheme’s, both home and abroad. Politicians like this a lot, because one can only raise taxes to a limited extent before risking serious public outcry. Far better to stealthily steal by proxy, which is the FED. Of course, We the SheeplePeople pay the price. Quite literally.

    All in all a great article. Thnx a bunch!

    Kind regs from Amsterdam,
    Sag.

    • scheme’s = schemes (damn, just when – in another reply – I thought I’d nailed the its/it’s thing).

      • English is a headache. I do envy you bi-and multi-linguals, though. You end up knowing a lot about your own language that wouldn’t be accessible any other way.

        I wonder if Chinese will become the lingua franca in the coming centuries?? Probably not. They are most utilitarian: they use what works in other cultures with their own amendments. Thus they’ve developed a simplified alphabet. I’ve not seen it, though. I suspect it will spread.

        The drawback to WordPress is not being able to edit your own comments.

        • There’s a lovely little story by a world-famous (in Holland that is) Dutch writer. It’s about this old professor who provides his whizzkid nephew with some “what-if” historical data to feed into his computer. After a while, the machine spits out the inevitable outcome: Dutch will be used world-wide as the international language in commerce, science, and what have you. In this wonderful scenario, Americans would have an advantage since you guys generally seem faster than the English to pick up Dutch 😉

          • The Dutch may have surrendered New Amsterdam, but their mercantile spirit is still the foundational spirit of New York City. We might as well blame y’all for the creeping socialism because it’s really rampant in the state. Even as people flee the tax burden to live elsewhere, the legislature and the NYC council both keep laying it on.

            I’m not given to ghosties etc., but the few times I’ve traveled the beautiful Hudson River Valley (many parts are still so), I have a strong sense of the Dutch folk buried up and down its length. They have a kind of melancholy presence for me…it was that ‘underfeeling’ that led to me read up on it.

            http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Amsterdam

            You’ll see many Dutch place names and surnames there, too. Of course the Anglo overlay is very strong, but underneath it all, the Dutch, who let a ship of Jews in after that they’d been turned away from every New England port by the descendants of those persecuted bigots who’d found refuge in Holland when they fled England (before finally setting sail to the new world). The tolerant Dutch ways didn’t rub off on their Puritan guests…

            OTOH, if the Dutch have a fatal flaw it is that strange admixture which produces the iron fist in the velvet glove…should we ask Gregorious Nekshott about his experience of ‘tolerance’ in his own land? I think he was the only recipient of the Free Press award in Denmark who had to appear in disguise – so he wore a burqa.

            Americans don’t generally learn other languages. We haven’t had to because the continent is so big and most of us never leave home. The woman who cuts my hair lives a few miles away. She’s an outlander to her husband’s family because she came from another part of the *county*. Wonder what that makes us??

            The strongest motive for Americans to learn another language is perhaps personified by the fast-disappearing American G.I., and we know what *he* wanted…

          • It would be nice to live in close proximity to places where other languages predominate. For the great majority of Americans, that is not the case. Some can easily travel to Mexico or Quebec, but for most it’s a long and expensive trip to a place where we could be immersed in another language for any length of time. (And some of us aren’t keen on spending time in Mexico or its northern extensions.) That is the main reason — not laziness or arrogance — why the majority of Americans are not fluent in anything but English.

        • @Radegunda-

          A language needs a community, doesn’t it? Here, in a deeply rural area, they say they speak English. The natives, I mean. Those who’ve never been further east than Richmond or north than Charlottesville speak a strange Southern talk. The Baron may be able to imitate it; I can’t. And if they speak real fast, I have to ask them to repeat.

          The black language is different from the white, but the latter is not necessarily more comprehensible. OTOH, when I watch east Londoners talk on You Tube, I have the same problem…

  2. Here’s a tax to think about: the cost of the NSA snooping comes out to more than 500.00 a year per citizen.

    “For months, the American public has received a steady stream of new information detailing the massive scale and scope of the United States’ spying activities. Of course, maintaining a surveillance state powerful enough to reach into the inboxes of world leaders, friend and foe, is not cheap. Indeed, as the Washington Post revealed when it released portions of the so-called Black Budget, this year’s price tag on America’s spook infrastructure comes out to a whopping $52.6 billion.”

    I’ll bet that is a silver lining for Merkel, et al…can’t say I blame them.

    http://www.cato.org/blog/nsas-rent-too-damn-high

    (Yes, he can say ‘damn’ and we can’t. The home schooling parents will just have to explain the language of economists to their students. Tsk.)

  3. In the West, Commandment #11 applies universally. Cribbing from Bertold Brecht (a commie but genius) and adapting him to modern times:

    XI. The people have forfeited the confidence of the government. Therefore, it is vitally necessary that the government dissolve the people and import another.”

  4. Commandment I: a great one to begin with. The nanny state indeed loves wars, especially perpetual wars (or at least “perpetual” enough to a politician’s mindset).

    So here I’d like to add this government-sponsored “War on Terror”. It is my opinion that we in the anti-Islam movement better steer clear of this ludicrous war against a tactic, and not confuse it with or take it for our struggle against Islam. Already we see signs that the WoT is coming home to haunt freedom-loving Americans (e.g. citizens who happen to carry a pocket US Constitution with them).

    Kind regs from Amsterdam,
    Sag.

  5. XI. The people have forfeited the confidence of the government. Therefore, it is vitally necessary that the government dissolve the people and import another.

    (Partly cribbed from Bertold Brecht and adapted to our times)

    • I can certainly relate to that. It has been told to the American voter that 15% of the population is without health insurance. Rather than building clinics (BTW, why don’t they just build the frickin clinics in the parking lots of the hospitals) and offering incentives to Drs to work in these clinics, the Obama admin decided to create a problem that would turn our health delivery system on its head. So now, everyone has to share in the pain. Many of which simply can’t afford it, no matter how much the left preaches their new “sub-standard health insurance” talking point.
      Is it “sub-standard” for an under 30 year old to have a catastrophic health insurance policy with a high deductible and low premium in the event that he wipes out his motorcycle? I don’t think an under 30 male needs maternity care, rogaine or lactation instruction!
      So, create a problem and then find a big gov’t solution…
      I am part of the 2nd wave. Our health insurance is provided through our employer. I CAN’T WAIT to see how many working Americans are thrown off their employer health insurance programs just before the 2014 elections…
      I predict a blood bath.

      • You may be literally right, Babs.

        And this is planned malfesance, never forget that. Obama wants to destroy the middle class. He’s honest about that sometimes.

    • XII. Create problems for the solutions.

      Asset stripping bankrupt Britain in the name of shrinking government while franchising the Potyomkin solutions at extortionate costs.

      Small government can be as corrupt as big government.

  6. XIII.
    Wipe out freedom but let license bloom.
    Wipe out discrimination, fertilize nondiscrimination. In everything.
    Wipe out virtue, restraint and beauty. Encourage vice, crime and ugliness.

  7. XIV.
    When entering into a “social contract” with the People, government must be and must remain the sole interpreter of that contract, the interpretation always favouring the expansion of government powers.

  8. XV.
    In order to provide even better services, government needs to know what goes on inside your mind, dear citizen. Therefore it must control what goes in. The imput is partly supervised through the system of government schools including the language used to express our thoughts. Synthetic language replaces the old idiom:

    Nature becomes “environment”.
    Growth becomes “progress”.
    Tradition becomes “obstruction to emancipation”.
    Resistance becomes “empowerment”.
    Merry Christmas becomes “happy holidays”.
    Dutchy becomes “Native Netherlandarian”.

    And so on.. ad infinitum.

    Cheers,
    Sag.

    • Interesting. Last year I sent GOV some Christmas cookie recipes from a 60 year old cookbook that was mainly a compilation of European traditional recipes. GOV didn’t publish it.
      My point in sending them in was to rekindle traditional cultural recipes that might re-flame a nationalist pride in culture.
      Until Europe really stands up and demands this pride in culture you will continue to decline.

      • Babs…ALL my cookie recipes are well over 100 years old and they’re mostly European. I’m a first-gen American and I used to collect cookbooks.

        I have a favorite casserole from Martha Washington too. No flour, but she could afford a lotta eggs.

        We’re having our fundraiser soon. You’ve given me an idea: how about we do some recipes for Thanksgiving. You know what I mean – Aunt SarahJane’s sweet potato pie-type stuff. We could do regional recipes, especially those on either side of the Mason-Dixon line.

        And maybe people could send in their stuffing recipes? Or do they call it dressing?

        From following the US government’s food pyramid obediently for many years – hey, my doctor loved it – I have an impaired endocrine system so I can’t eat a lot of things that I still cook for those who weren’t impaired by it. Like the Baron.

        • About 20 years ago our private school decided to cancel Thanksgiving… I think I posted about this many years back. They claimed that T-Day was about Butterball turkeys and canned cranberries and, that the time could be much better spent celebrating Cinco de Mayo!

          I did some research back then and discovered that T-Day enjoyed varied different culinary histories based on traveler’s impediments and available food stocks. For example, those that made it to the Rio Grande celebrated with fish and fresh water!

          I would be more than willing to re-post my European cookie recipes as well as the stuffing recipe that I have used for 35 years.

          My point in this is that if you do not demonstrate your cultural heritage to the next generation it will be lost.

          • BTW, the pecan is the only indigenous nut in north america!
            So, if you really want to celebrate our north american history you will employ pecans.
            Just another little tidbit I gleaned when faced with the cancellation of T-Day by our oh so liberal betters…

        • Great idea about recipes around Thanksgiving and the cultural thing. My wife has a recipe for sweet potato suffle she scrounged from her maid who made it every Thanksgiving in Tennessee where she was raised. I am sure this idea would bring in many, many heart felt recipes and much needed income for you folks. Lets get started!!

  9. Those liberals will stop at nothing!

    Probably some Muslims involved I would have thought …the two go hand in hand.

  10. XX (okay might have skipped a few).
    The inherent path of a country’s socio-economic-political trajectory follows the cycle observed repeatedly throughout history. Find you place on that path, and plan accordingly. (not saying that I am being fatalistic).

    If you can read this years from now and the cycle hasn’t broken, then make some popcorn and enjoy the movie (especially if you are lucky enough to be at that point where ‘we the people’ are even closer to 100% hapless tools of the ruling class). Serfdom I think some obscure economist might have said.

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