Death by a million cuts

The ancient Chinese torture of death by a thousand cuts, or slow-slicing, sounds like a terrible way to die, doesn’t it? Yet, each of those thousand cuts seems not significant or life-threatening. In exactly the same manner, the United States is being brought to its knees, but by far more than a thousand cuts. In exactly the same manner, each “cut” seems almost insignificant.

The “cuts” I refer to are the untold, relatively small amounts of “government money” most of us gleefully accept. We accept them, truly believing that it is free money… money from the government, blindly ignoring the fact that ALL money from the government comes from taxes extracted from all of us.

So-called government money, even at it’s absolute BEST, goes to support activities that are not possible otherwise. Those activities, if they were necessary and useful to others, WOULD be possible without tax money.

Any activity that cannot be successfully undertaken without forcibly taking money from the people, is an activity that should remain undone.

We can each of us play “Wouldn’t it be swell if…” and tack on thousands of wonderful ideas that would make life around us more pleasant or handsome. The traditional manner of dealing with such an idea is to adopt and entrepreneurial attitude… to build it and hope that enough others hold it as wonderful to make it self-supporting or even profitable. The standard for judging the merit of an idea is “are there enough other people willing to pay for it to make it happen?“

“Government money” is precisely the opposite… it is money granted for a purpose that, almost by definition, cannot attract enough subscribers to be profitable on it’s own merits. It is money that is stolen from people who have nothing to say about it… money they would NOT have given willingly, so it is taken from them. Is that something to be proud of?

To receive government money is not always simple, unless you have an influential friend in government (and having one is not simple or easy either). Government grants usually require a complex grant application, written in a special language designed to impress without saying anything specific. Such language is expected, as a means of protecting the granter from criticism in case the grantee’s project amounts to little. Here is a sentence describing the aim of a particular set of grants:

“Funded projects support digitization and collections management plans, enhanced accessibility, environmental literacy, and much more.”

Is there anything about that you understand? Environmental literacy? Given those aims, could you write a grant application that made any sense?

Government money isn’t free, even to the recipient. Aside from the laborious task of writing and applying, grantees will be expected to perform, or at least SOUND like they’re performing, so the obfuscating language will continue.

The cost I hate most about “government money” is that it changes those who seek it; it changes the focus of the organization, from complete concentration on performing to attract users or customers, to performing for the granting body. Think of it as “chasing free money”. It takes time away from what might work best long-run to what will work to get the free money. Thus, chasing free money creates a dependency on free money, by reducing the entrepreneurial capability of the organization. Often, an organization will undertake a major project simply because government money is available for it… a project that otherwise was not important enough to be undertaken. Primary focuses get ignored in favor of chasing what money is available for, and soon the organization is less interested in paying customers than in funding sources.

There are millions of such examples, each representing a small cut in what made our nation great. Each cut seems insignificant, but the result is a nation that is trillions of dollars in debt, with a populace that is in the process of forgetting how to survive without stealing from each other.