Intentions

From Rush Limbaugh today:

"The Great Society was a failure, the war on poverty was a failure. We've spent ten trillion dollars. It's a failure, and yet the people that came up with the plan are lauded to this day as great, compassionate, concerned Americans, not because it succeeded or failed, but because they cared, because of their intentions."

This is a major problem with politicians. They go out on a crusade to right the wrongs of society, to fix the failings of the free market. And they end up screwing everything up! They create more wrongs and greater failings, but when the dust settles they are not held to account. Those who backed the Great Society have now created a $30+ Trillion liability through Medicare on top of $100's of Billions already spent, add to that $100's of Billions spent on education, fighting poverty, Medicaid (which is starting to bankrupt many states), and then throw in funding for the arts, public broadcasting, transportation, and environmental protection; throw in all the government agencies created with all their regulations and you have a cost to our society that is enormous that we truly can't even comprehend it.

And where are all these noble and benevolent individuals, other than LBJ most Americans probably couldn't name one single politician from the 1960's who was involved in the passage of the Acts that comprise the Great Society. In my study I have run across a few of them and they are obscure and unrecognizable names (footnotes to footnotes in the pages of history, as the Great One calls them). And every single one of us is paying a huge price in so many ways for this legislative disaster.

We must remember though, all of these people had the best of intentions...

But