Kalispell Gathering 2006, Part 29

Everybody that takes a job no matter who they are wants to do a good job. When we send a person to congress, he feels and sees by the reality around him that in order to do a good job he has to spend lots of money and raise lots of money and that means he has to tax us a lot and spend as much money as he can. If he does that then he is basically doing a good job. And he is doing what everybody in the universe does and that is if he is given a job then he wants to do a good job.

The only way to change this is to change the politician’s job description and if we do not do this then it will continue the way it is and most likely get worse. People do not realize that politicians see spending money as part of a job description, and then of course we grumble about it. We complain that they are spending us into the poor house.

What we need to do is change their job description, instead of giving them the description to make laws, they should not only make laws but do away with bad or obsolete laws. Like Jesse Ventura says, keep laws that are pertinent but also go ahead and get rid of the laws that are useless. Spend maybe a third of the time going through all these laws that are on the books and eliminating out any that are not doing any good.

The second thing is to pay these guys a bonus if they spend less money. Put it as part of their job description to be conservative with spending money so they only spend money on the essentials and not boondoggles like this representative from Alaska wanted to spend 2 or 3 billion on a bridge that 50 people would use. And this was crazy. Fortunately there was so much public outcry due to the media attention that they stopped this bridge to nowhere as it was called.

The argument for it was that it was going to bring employment to some people. Well, duh, if you build a tower out in the middle of nowhere you are going to give some people employment until the tower is completed.

We see that there are certain things being done that we do not like. We see that the average person spends 50% of their money giving in various taxes. In ancient Rome the slave gave a third of his money to the master. We give over 50% on the average if we figure in all the hidden taxes. So what is the difference between us, and the Roman slaves?

As far as money goes the only difference is because of technology we have it easier than the Roman slaves. We have cars, TVs, computers, so even though we are paying 50% of our earnings to the state we are better off than even the Emperor was in those days. That is something to be thankful for when you think about it. We are better off than kings were a couple hundred years ago. Could a king in England get a fresh orange for breakfast? Probably not because by the time it got to London it would have spoiled. Think of olden times and it was hard to ship food products long distances without the food spoiling. What we ate tonight was pretty simple but it was as good as a king would eat one hundred years ago. So it is amazing when you think that the average person today has 50% of their money taken away by the government and in the days of the Roman Empire the slave who had his own business had to give less than this to his master and then he could do whatever he wanted with the rest. He could expand his business or whatever because he was making his master money. The master was and the slave were happy, so it is amazing when you think about it.

In an ideal society I think that people should have to give 10%, which is actually written in the Bible. In ancient Israel they gave 10% to run everything and 10% took care of all the needs of the government at the time and this was voluntary. That was enough to finance everything they needed and I think this could be done today. I think the most we would ever have to tax say in an emergency would be 20%. In times of peace 10% should pay for everything that we need. What do we need and where should the taxes go? Let’s put away defense because if we were under a great threat then we would have to go more than the 10% but let’s say outside of some type of defense that required extensive means what would we do with the 10%?

Audience: Maintenance

JJ: Much of that could be done by voluntary work. If we were in a gathered place, let us say we were all living here we could make assignments to take turns with maintenance. We would not really have to pay for that. With medical, 90% of what a doctor does could be done with a small amount of training. The mistake they make in socialists countries is they just expect everybody to do their share and of course they do not. So whatever you do there has to be a system set up if one does not do the assigned task then he will not get A, B, or C or has to pay out of his pocket. That is good motivation.

Audience: You have to be guaranteed the work will be done.

JJ: Yes. For instance with medical bills, medical expenses are extremely high. Everybody complains about big oil but when I had the accident with my hand in 1958 my hospital bill for my room was $8 a day and gas was 39.9 cents a gallon and it stayed that way for quite a while. The last I heard a hospital room is $1300 to $2000 a day. If gas were to have gone up the same amount as a hospital room from when I was in the hospital then gas would be $60 a gallon. So my question is why is everybody complaining about big oil instead of big hospital? When you look at it from this aspect big oil has kept costs down 30 to 40 times better than big medicine has. Is this complaining not misplaced?

Audience: When you have life-threatening situation you do not even think about the cost.

JJ: If we have this part of our costs going up 30 and 40 times faster isn’t there something wrong with this picture? Where is the problem? Most of the problem is the government interferes and this creates an even bigger problem than before. Instead of fixing the problem government makes it worse and it ends up costing more creates more fraud, bureaucracy and more expenses. Every time the government steps in it creates a tremendous rise in cost and we end up paying for it. They keep trying to step in and take over with oil. Remember with Nixon and Jimmy Carter how they stepped in and put in price controls and then the price of gas doubled. So, if they could just step out and leave us alone we would be a lot better off. As a matter of fact Wall Street always says it is a blessing when congress is not in session because stocks always do well. But when they go back in session it scares everyone and we never know what they are going to come up with.

Audience: I think one thing we have left out of the medical equation is that medicine has made a lot of improvements since 1958. They can save lives because they have the technology and know that they did not have back then.

JJ: Right, they do have more expensive equipment and for those of us who do not use this equipment we still have to pay for it because say if you went in for a broken finger then they have to factor in the cost for the equipment. So one has to pay for all the expensive equipment that they do not use and those who do use the expensive equipment have really got to pay through the nose. That is just one-way they charge and there are additional expenses but they are not 30 to 40 times a high.

Copyright 2010 by J J Dewey