When I speak on-line on various sites, including JoeUser.com about the role of government, it becomes apparent quickly that many people think of the government as some sort of independent entity that is not connected to us.  Those people tend to favor having the government solve all kinds of problems, including problems better left to individuals to solve for themselves.

People like me, as I discussed in the philosophies of the left and the right are wary of having the government do anything that we could be doing for ourselves. The reason for that is because we recognize that the government is us. When the government does something, we're basically paying money to have someone else do it. In an episode of The Simpsons, Homer runs for sanitation commissioner. His campaign slogan is "Can't someone else do it?" He promises that the garbage men will take care of everything from emptying the litter box to changing diapers. Of course, after he's elected he puts his program in action and quickly runs out of money. It was hilarious and yet it had a point - no one is going to be as efficient at taking care of you as you are. Sure, we can pay someone else to change our litter box but it'll cost a lot more for the government to do it than it would for you to do it yourself.

In a country in which half the adult population effectively pays no federal taxes, it becomes pretty tempting to vote in programs that take care of all kinds of things we could do ourselves. Programs that involve literally giving money to other people are, in essence, asking other individuals to pay for something for someone else. When people demand universal coverage to be paid for by "the government" what they are really asking for is their neighbors pay for their health care. Oddly, I have seen few movements to try to start health care charities. How many people who support government health care would be willing to go door to door asking their neighbors to chip in to pay for their own health care?

Or let me be even more explicit: Federal taxes represent days of the year that you work exclusively for the federal government.  Let's say you pay 30% of your taxes to the federal government.  That's about 120 days. 4 months. January, February, March, April . Those are the 4 months that you work exclusively for the federal government. When you start looking at it like that, you start to view things a bit differently.

When someone throws up their hands and says "let's have the government do this" they are really asking the 50% of the adult population who pays taxes to do it for them. We already, for example, work 2 weeks each year just paying the interest on the debt. Isn't that nice?  And because the government is so wasteful, the 50% who pay taxes end up working more days for the government than would have been necessary otherwise.

You say you like Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare? Well, if you're like me, you are already working 50 days each year to pay for it.  Imagine what you could do if those 7 weeks of income were instead put into some sort of private saving's account or a mutual fund or heck, saved towards buying a house? But instead, it goes to social security and unfortunately, it's a rotten investment for most of us. How rotten, how about this: If you were to pay say $5,000 per year from age 20 to 30 and then never pay another cent after that into savings, at an annual investment rate of 7% (a little less than the S&P 500 average) then at age 65 you would have around $600,000. Let's say you you received payments over the next 30 years (until you were 95) from it.  That would be over $20,000 per year for 30 year! And remember, this is with eliminating saving even one penny more after you turned 30. Most people would likely continue to save something for retirement, this just illustrates how extremely wasteful Social Security et al is.  Instead, we pay and pay and pay and for what? A bunch of little checks that had made no interest at all. And why? Because a bunch of people successfully argued that we should just throw up our hands and let the government take care of retirement for us. And so now we work 2 months each year for the government for the rest of our non-retired lives so that we can get a bunch of little checks.

Of course, the counter to this, which is valid, is that these programs help the sick, the poor, and the unfortunate. I think most people are willing to work several days each year to help them. Unfortunately while supporting the sick, poor, and unfortunate we also support the lazy, the foolish, and the unscrupulous. And it is very hard for the government to make a distinction between the two groups.  Which is precisely why so many Americans, such as myself, oppose programs that replace individualism with collectivism. If it's something we could really do for ourselves, then it's probably better to do ourselves. And to protect the sick, the poor, and the unfortunate private institutions or at worse the state and local governments are better off doing that -- because they are much better equipped to tailor their programs to the needs of their constituents than some far off bureaucrat.

I am okay with the current tax system - if I make more, I can afford to pay more. I'm fine with that.  What I am against is a system in which we give up personal responsibility to ourselves and our community to some far off government bureaucrat who will never be able to do the job as efficiently as we could do for ourselves.