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The top-two of the most often told lies:
- The cheque is in the mail.
- I'm from the government, and I'm here to help you.
In between the meetings I attended during the last eight days, I had to
squeeze in attendance at a one-day session (last Tuesday from 8:00 to
17:00 hrs) in connection with the government-sponsored and -promoted
Alberta Roundtable on Family Violence (FV) and
Bullying.
I see parallels between
the
Alberta FV Roundtable and the
Alberta Rural
Development Initiative. In a nutshell, both use a universal recipe for the transfer and
transformation of individual rights and freedoms to and into government
power and central control by government.
The FV Roundtable is essentially a brainstorming process via which input
is gathered from paid employees (in government and in government-funded
agencies) and from unpaid volunteers — both involved in addressing
FV-related issues and consequences. The proportions of the participants in
the FV Roundtable process are roughly:
- Government and government-funded paid employees: 74%
- Unpaid volunteers: 25%
- Victims: 1%
The FV industry thrives, and it will thrive a lot more. Yet, the total
number of annual fatalities from partner violence is in the order of 84 in
all of Canada (one quarter of them acknowledged to be men), less than the
estimated 94 fatalities that occur each year on account of people falling
out of bed.
The hundreds of millions, even billions of dollars we threw at
the FV problem had no marked impact on family violence trends. Indeed, if
we are to believe the statistics produced by feminist advocacy researchers
and bureaucrats, the
problem grew the more worse the more money we threw at it. Money is
perhaps not the root of all evil, but it sure is good fertilizer and can
be used to make evil grow.
From my involvement in similar processes (e.g.:
the Alberta Justice Summit), although
the current process is far more slick, on account of being steered by
skilful professional PR
experts, the current FV Roundtable looks very familiar. Officially it has
the goal of finding solutions that will facilitate the eradication of all
family violence and bullying in Alberta — which is a Utopian goal that
cannot be achieved without totally changing human nature to be in line
with the principles prevailing in and governing an insect hive. The hidden
agenda will, by design or default:
-
Intensify the centralization of decision-making, in effect reducing
and curtailing the civil
liberties and freedoms of individuals;
-
Maintain the status quo, namely the promotion and furthering of the
inexorably escalating trend to transfer more and more power from citizens
into the hands of the State;
-
Give the bureaucracy the means (i.e.: increased levels of funding and
public consent) to escalate the disfranchisement of all individuals;
-
Provide volunteers with the illusion that they constructively contribute
to improving our society, and thereby fairly effectively silence them by
keeping them busy and having them lend an air of respectability and
acceptability to the whole process, thereby providing credibility to the
government's claim that the whole process is driven by, and a reflection
of, public opinion.
The effectiveness of propaganda came a long way since the crude and
amateurish methods used by Joseph Goebbels, then Germany's Minister of
Education.
It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out the opinions of which
participating group will carry the day. The FV Roundtable essentially
pretends that it is a democratic process. There is as of now nothing in
place that objectively and according to absolute standards evaluates which
of the many ideas presented by hundreds of individuals will be most
beneficial to Alberta society and should therefore be ranked at the top of
the list of things to do. The voice of the "democratic" majority (that of the bureaucrats)
in the process will be the one that will determine what will be done in
the end. Thereby the promise delivered in the throne speech will be
addressed via the methods that the bureaucrats wish to see in place.
Merely by claiming that what it does helps to bring the sought-after
solution, the bureaucracy will be enabled through virtually inexhaustible
funding to re-engineer society.
There will be no success in meeting the stated goal, except that the
bureaucracy will claim to be fully successful because it managed to get
everyone in Alberta involved, without the bureaucracy being held to
account to demonstrate in objective terms whether or how much progress
occurred per dollar invested in the throne speech pipe dream.
What the bureaucrats will ultimately identify and construct will
ostensibly cater to the promise announced in the throne speech. However,
it will in reality be the materialization of what the bureaucrats wish to
do. That is to throw more money at problems for which the evidence shows a
long record proving that throwing more of taxpayers' money (produced
through steadily escalating overt and covert taxation) at those problems
will achieve not only further deterioration of social conditions but also
increasing and escalating growth of the bureaucracy.
The bureaucrats
maintain at all cost the illusion that by throwing more money at "a system
that is not quite perfected" (in reality it is broken), the perceived
problem symptoms will vanish, while in reality the fundamental problem
causes will intensify. After all, it was throwing money at them that all
along caused those problems to intensify. The laws of nature and logic
cannot be changed by wishing for them to change.
The acceleration of the unchecked growth of the bureaucracy and the
deterioration of the well-being of society are mutually dependent
conditions. The collapse of the USSR is the most renowned proof of that.
Another, less well-known proof is the collapse and fall of the Roman
Empire. It, too, fell victim to a burgeoning, corrupt and
back-breaking bureaucracy voracious for ever increasing taxation.
After that came the Dark Age. Nevertheless, we do our very best to catch up to the level of social
"progress" achieved in the countries of the former USSR and communist
block.
My summarization of the FV Roundtable process is this:
The government has become aware of the consequences, but does not
acknowledge the causes, of the destruction of our families. Rather than to
restore conditions for families to their former greatness, the government
now tries to do its best to determine what it is that families did that
worked so well before families became largely and increasingly more
eradicated. But, rather than letting families do what they do best, the
government is determined to do its best to disfranchise families, to act
instead of families, and to dictate to individuals how, and by what
innovative rules, to live. Not a single public servant can possibly have,
let alone maintain, with the public the close and loving personal
relationships that family members have when they unselfishly care for one
another. What family members do out of love and respect, the government
bureaucrats do for mercenary purposes.
The government, after having successfully done its best to destroy our
families, now attempts to construct a government-run, -controlled and
-funded substitute for our families, a super-family, a single "family" in
which, instead of functioning communities, we will have the community of
women that communists called for all along since the days of Marx and
Engels. That'll never work well, but it will use taxpayers' money to
attempt doing without love what families did for the pure love and joy of
it and without charge. Once upon a time the government provided help and
support to families, amongst other things, in the form of tax relief.
Social conditions changed since then. There is now in essence punitive
taxation of people that insist on living according to the model of the
traditional, one-income-earner, nuclear family.
The taxpayer is the breadwinner of that new, government-run super-family,
and already 70 percent of social contributions are paid by men, while women make
use of 70 percent of all social benefits paid out. That is the reality of
the "freedom" that women's "liberation" brought women: the welfare state.
The welfare state is a dysfunctional family, and its head, the government,
is the greatest abuser of all. Never in our history have there been so
many women and children in poverty. Never before have there been such
massively large and growing numbers of suicides (more than 4,000 per year
now in Canada, and 80 percent of them men and boys).
It will take little effort to transform the preceding three paragraphs
into a statement that will summarize the circumstances of the
Alberta Rural
Development Initiative (the same rules apply, just some of the terms
change). That is best left to someone that participated in the
information-gathering process that resulted in the report on the
Alberta Rural
Development Initiative.
In 1962 my family and I came to Alberta. Alberta was then a wonderful
place filled with about 1.8 million people of whom many were not rich but
proud and full of justified hope that they would be able to bring about
many and large improvements to their lives and to the the lives of their loved
ones. It is astounding to see that in trying to solve perpetual and
relatively minor problems, unimaginably large sums of money were stuffed
into solutions that themselves became the causes of far greater social
problems. The most prominent of the detrimental consequences of
intensifying the socialist social engineering of the last four decades
are:
-
Deteriorating social conditions.
-
Unchecked, exponential growth of the bureaucracy.
-
Steadily escalating taxation to pay for the progress we did not make in
spite of paying through the nose for it.
Wait up, USSR, we want to catch up!
Let's all wake up! This is not a nightmare, it is reality! Intensifying
the centralization of political power and control of society in the hands
of the bureaucracy unavoidably and inexorably leads to totalitarianism. No
other outcome is possible when we go down that road. At the end of that
road are social collapse, anarchy and chaos.
My parents saw that happen twice in their life-time. I saw it happen once
already; and it was not an experience I care to repeat. Am I destined to
see it happening a second time? I hope that I don't live that long, but
chances are I will, and I fear for my children and grandchildren. I fear
for us all.
We must attempt to fully restore individual rights and freedoms to
individuals, communities, industry and commerce. The bureaucracy must not
remain our master. It must once more become our servant. The Rural
Development Initiative will not help. All it will do is create more
dependence on government largesse, with all that brings: more government
control, more red tape, a rapidly growing bureaucracy, and escalating
taxation. After all, there is no such thing as a free lunch. Somebody must
foot the bill. That will be the taxpayers. They'll pay for generations to
come. They'll pay for generations for the things we claim to enjoy now, the things that
the bureaucracy and the politicians it pushes along tell us are so good
for us.
I would like to get some of the rights and capabilities back that 40 years
ago entitled me to have anything I wanted I paid for myself, that
I decided I could afford, that nobody but I paid for, that I could afford
to pay for in the early 1960s, when the level of taxation on the average
Canadian income was 21 percent instead of the current 53 percent. I
would like to get away from being forced to pay for things that other
people want and that they are entitled to by law but not morally, and that
they are not willing to pay for themselves.
I would love to be able once more to worship according to my choice and
without politically-correct constraints instead of having to squeeze my
beliefs into the little space left by the State-religion of totalitarian
secularism that promotes, with our money,
the new religion of earth-worship.
I wish to be able, according to moral standards that endured for thousands
of years and had made our civilization great, to decide what is right and
wrong, to regulate my own life and have my children and grandchildren live
theirs without interference and control by our increasingly more and more
totalitarian State. It may be too late now to hope for that to
happen. A new Dark Age
is the more likely outcome, actually, it is upon us already, now that the
sun of the Western cultural heritage is rapidly setting into the mire of
multi-culturalism and the murk of unlimited "freedoms" that we keep
getting rammed down our throats and that choke the life out of us.
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