In the 1962 Oscar Award winning movie, The Music Man, traveling con man Harold Hill comes to River City posing as a “Professor of Music”. He convinces the townspeople that “ya got trouble” in River City, and the only way to solve their “trouble” is to form a music band. He proceeds to take money from the townsfolk to buy instruments, uniforms, sheet music, instructional material. Yet, he is not a professor, does not have a degree, and knows nothing about music. He eventually absconds with the townspeople’s money.
And that’s the way it works. If you can convince someone there is a problem, then it becomes easy to convince them to follow your “solution” to their problem which primarily benefits you. We see that in advertising all the time. The first part of the commercial is telling you that you have a problem; the second part is the solution to your problem, buy their product.
It is interesting that the “troubles” that our leaders continually tell us to fear, we can’t see, the Covid virus (120 nanometers), carbon-dioxide (odorless and invisible), white supremacy, but we are assured that they are existential threats that must be stopped. And the solutions to these existential threats usually benefit those who tell us they are existential threats.
We are told that climate change is a crisis, even though it doesn’t feel like a crisis. But we are told it’s an existential threat by the very people whose livelihoods depend on it being an existential threat. Does anyone actual believe that a climate scientist who is making six figures from our federal government is going to conclude through their research that, “after all, there is no climate change”? It would be quicker just to say, “fire me”. So, not only will these scientists most certainly conclude that climate change is real, they will also claim that it’s an existential threat to humanity, so we will do or spend almost anything to eliminate it.
How can we believe there is climate change when many prominent climate proponents act as if there is no climate change? Al Gore owns two mansions with a combined carbon footprint 20 times greater than the average family. Barack Obama purchased a $12 million mansion in Martha’s Vineyard, on the edge of the ocean that will supposed bury it under water in a few years due to climate change. John Kerry flies around the world to and from climate conferences in carbon spewing private jets. If according to their behavior, climate change does not exist, then why are these people so passionately claiming that it does? The same reason they do everything; money and power. The Green New Deal is a multi-trillion-dollar boon to them, as they and their donor class are poised to get the lion’s share of all that government spending.
We are told that our crumbling infrastructure is also a crisis. Congress is poised to pass a $1.4 trillion dollar “infrastructure” bill because they argue that our infrastructure is in dire need of repair, yet less than 10% of the money in the bill goes for things like building bridges, roads and other physical infrastructure. The politicians pushing this bill have re-labeled many of their pet projects like amnesty, canceling student loan debt, free childcare, as "human infrastructure". These lies are no different than the lies that Harold Hill told the people of River City to steal their money, and that’s what is being done the United States tax payer. Our hard-earned money is being stolen from us by liars.
During the Covid crisis, many of the politicians who mandated masks and lockdowns to stop the spread of Covid were caught violating their own rules. The Biden administration which has re-instituted mask mandates, and is mandating vaccines, have imported over 100,000 Covid-positive illegal immigrants into this country. If they actually believed Covid was still a problem to the point of mandates and restricting freedom, why haven’t they shut down the border to unvaccinated and untested illegal immigrants? Power. They do not want to control the illegal immigrants or Covid, they want to control you. They want more and more power over your life.
All of the solutions to these problems that our leaders offer give them more of our money, more of our freedoms, more of our rights, and more power. It does not matter that the history of our government solving problems is absolutely abysmal. Our public schools are failing; Our cities are being devastated by violent crime, drugs and homelessness; our economy is being destroyed by hyper-inflation; our borders are wide open; Social Security and Medicare are perpetually on the brink of bankruptcy; we have lost the war on drugs; and we just lost a 20-year war to a country still mired in the 15th century. There are very few federal government program that can be pointed to as a success, and yet our leaders in the federal government continue to act as if they are the answer to every problem.
The United States federal government is the biggest scam ever perpetrated on the American people. That is not to say that there are not vital functions of the federal government that we would not be able to survive without, but the extent to which the federal government has expanded its reach beyond those vital functions into areas of life that they should not enter, or are incapable of performing is the fraud and the reason why they fail to deliver the vital functions they were originally charged to perform.
Our federal government takes in over $4 trillion every year. To put that number into perspective; if the government spent $1 billion per day, it would take 10.9 years to spend $4 trillion dollars, yet with all that money, we can’t find a way to educate our children properly, to keep drugs off the streets and out of schools, to protect our borders, to stop the epidemic of violent crime that’s destroying our cities. It’s embarrassing, but what is more embarrassing is that these failures in our government have the audacity to come to the American people asking for a $3.5 trillion spending spree. That would be like the worst employee at a company who constantly screws up and is on the brink of being fired, demanding a pay raise. Read the room.
And even if the troubles our elected officials attempt to scare us about are actually real, what evidence is there that shows that they are the ones to fix those problems? There are hundreds of other problems that they have spent trillions trying to fix but failed, and actually made worse. At least the laundry detergent in the 30 second commercial actually cleans your clothes in the end. There has never been a group of people who has failed more often, and more destructively who continually get more and more empowered than our elected officials in Washington.
There is trouble in this country. It comes in the form of 535 overly-empowered frauds sitting behind ornate wooden desks in Washington DC. And unless we solve that “trouble”, many of our other real “troubles” will never get solved.
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Judd Garrett is a graduate from Princeton University, and a former NFL player, coach, and executive. He has been a contributor to the website Real Clear Politics. He has recently published his first novel, No Wind.