Op-Ed: Itxu Díaz: Government Overreach and Its Obsession to Touch Everything

The government is a necessary evil. But it is an evil nonetheless.

Democracy puts someone who is not even related to you in charge of all the really important things in your life, including how fast you can drive or the price of beer. Perhaps it is someone who has lived in Washington for ten generations who has never even seen a sheep who decides how Nebraska herders should address their animals to ensure that the language is inclusive enough.

And there is little you can do about it. Anarchy is not an option.

I guess the government is like an elephant. It is not the fastest means of transportation. It does not serve to deter thieves from your home. It is not the most graceful animal. But if you leave it long enough, maybe it can accomplish all three. So in the end all you ask of your elephant is not to fall on you. The same goes for the government.

The main issue with having a big government is that it ends up taking care of things that work better on their own. In order to justify the disproportionate size of the different departments and agencies, politicians are forced to invent regulations on issues you didn’t even know existed.

Europe is a good example of this because it is the only continent in the world that you can cross from one end to the other, jumping from one stupid rule to another, without touching the ground. The European Union could even try to regulate the direction your blood circulates through your body and no member of the European Parliament would be the slightest bit surprised.

If it were left up to the Biden-Harris administration, America would be in the same boat.

The administrative web — European, national, regional, local — of the Old World is so dense that we would save a lot of paper if they printed a single guide with what is allowed. A couple of paragraphs would be sufficient.

Of course, the guide would have to be published on recycled paper, no plastic whatsoever, in 150 languages, in feminine and masculine, in singular and plural, with a disclaimer respecting Islamist beliefs and whale sentiments, an affidavit that no Finnish citizen from Lapland has been mistreated during its manufacture and promising to donate 30 percent of the cost of its production to erase its own ecological footprint (I think that an ecological footprint is one that leaves a cabbage when it passes over a freshly scrubbed floor).

Call it social democracy. Call it socialism. Call it whatever you want.

The left also has a strange sense of ownership over the public offices it holds. Perhaps that is why when leftists launch a campaign to support the underprivileged, they make it look like they are paying for it out of their own pocket. But no, I have bad news for Gen Z: It’s actually yours.

Thus, the chances of a government growing too large and becoming a burden on the nation are infinite. Sometimes a Reagan shows up, and the government flies lightly, but on other occasions an Obama emerges, and everything government is suddenly overweight, preventing the nation from taking flight and thus discouraging companies, frustrating workers and annulling the freedom of the individual in so many little things that a normal citizen does not even have time to count them; there’s nothing left to do but obey.

Also, in order for the government to legislate nonsense and carry it out, workers have to work, and that prevents the majority from being aware of the fine print in legislative activity.

After all, it is true that we obey the old elephant in power, but we do it with the same feeling that H.L. Mencken described: “The intelligent man, when he pays taxes, certainly does not believe that he is making a prudent and productive investment of his money; on the contrary, he feels that he is being mulcted in an excessive amount for services that, in the main, are useless to him, and that, in substantial part, are downright inimical to him.”

In short, be wary of any politician who has an excessive love of the exercise of power, who demands to expand federal powers, who walks with a copy of the Federal Register under his arm, or that you suspect may have the Capitol tattooed on a buttock.

But if you find one, just one, who does not have on his conscience the esoteric mandate to change the country, he’s the one — marry him.

This article first appeared on The Western Journal en Español.

This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.