Big Government & the PPP Loans

Perhaps the greatest lie perpetuated by Liberalism is that opposition to government involvement in a cause is opposition to that cause per se.

You oppose government involvement in welfare?  You want poor people to starve!

You oppose government involvement in education?  You want poor kids to be illiterate!

You oppose government involvement in healthcare?  You want poor people to die because they can't afford insulin or antibiotics!

And so on and so forth...

Unfortunately, most Americans can no longer imagine a world where anything is accomplished at all without government involvement.

Let me assure you that those of us who favor small government are, in fact, in favor of poor people eating, reading, and receiving medical treatment.  Many of us are, of course, the very poor people Liberals claim to want to help.  We recognize, however, that government agencies, especially those at the Federal level, are bloated bureaucracies that are unable to accomplish any goal efficiently.  

Exhibit A: the PPP loans.

The Paycheck Protection Program was designed to help companies bridge the gap during the COVID shutdowns, but ended up essentially as a slush fund for those who knew how access the funds.  Figures vary, but it is universally agreed that tens of billions were misappropriated, going to companies that didn't qualify and being used for anything but employees' paychecks.  What started out as a well-intentioned attempt to assist the American worker has since been called "the biggest fraud in US history."

The point is not that any one administration is corrupt or that the average IRS worker is a turncoat who hates his fellow countrymen.  The simple matter of the fact is that it is practically impossible to manage the disbursement of that much money efficiently.  The last census put the United States' population around 340 million people.  Any program that affects a significant portion of that many people is bound to suffer from inefficiencies and corruption. 

Moreover, the very people the PPP program was designed to help are now suffering from the loss of purchasing power that has resulted from three years of unfettered government spending.  Now we're attempting to resolve our problems by digging further and further into this miry hole we have dug.  The proactivity of the US government continues to create problems it then has to try to solve.

So, when a Conservative or Libertarian tells you he opposes [fill in the blank with any government program], don't buy the Liberal lie that we are heartless rich, white folks.  Most of us are not rich, many of us are not white, and very few of us are heartless.  We just understand that bloated government agencies rarely, if ever, accomplish their stated goal with any sort of efficiency.  

As Jim Quinn has so eloquently put it, "Liberalism always generates the exact opposite of its stated intent."

If government spending throughout COVID doesn't convince you of that, I'm not sure what will.