We have become addicted to funding. "We" means you and I, the People. "We" means school districts. "We" means town and county governments.
Perhaps there existed a time in the distant past in which federal and state funding for certain activities and goals was a reasonable idea. But those days are long gone. Reasonableness no longer exists in the tortured caverns of federal and state grants and aid and funding. We the People and They the State and Federal Governments have forgotten some very important truths and have embraced some very dangerous assumptions. We have forgotten that the money that the state and federal governments spends and extends is ours in the first place. We have assumed when we receive funding from the big government guys that it is somehow "free." It's not. They assume they have the right to tell us what to do and to limit our choices and our liberty when they send money our way. They don't.
Federal and state money comes with strings. It forges chains. It shackles freedom. It destroys individual choice for communities and for individuals. It results in the inefficiency of a distant - but powerful - bureaucracy. It results in the foolishness and unreasonableness of one-size fits all approaches to unique community situations. It dashes creative solutions on the rocks of cookie-cutter approaches.
Funding has become force.
State and Federal grants and aid have become weaponized as tools of manipulation to sculpt society into the society that THEY want, and we can be certain that the society they are sculpting will be a less free and a more dependent one.
How do we break the addiction and free ourselves from the chains that governmental funding has forged? It will not be an easy escape. Pain will be involved. But we must maneuver through the cavern we willingly entered and seek the way out. How? Well, to begin with, we must acknowledge that funding is not neutral. It comes with mandates. It involves a loss of local and personal sovereignty. We need to start talking about this privately and publicly. We need to start questioning ourselves, our school boards, our town and county officials about the funding streams they pursue and rely upon. We need to start pointing out the damage that is being done by such reliance. We must reframe how we view political success. Let's be honest, the average American citizen is prone to believe an elected official is successful if that official "brings home the bacon." The time has come to think differently about what we expect from our elected officials. Let's start expecting that they secure our liberties rather than funding. And, not only should we expect that, we need to communicate to them that this is our expectation. And we absolutely must become candidates ourselves. If we want good government, then good people need to start running for office at all levels: school boards, election boards, town, county, and beyond. For too long, good people have sat back and decided to keep their hands clean of what has become the dirt of government. We cannot continue such passivity. Passivity is simply cooperating quietly with the enemies of truth and freedom. It is surrender of the land of the free and the home of the brave.
We need to craft a new narrative and proclaim a new message that results in new assumptions: Funding from Albany and D.C. is costly to liberty. Let's discover creative and local funding solutions whenever possible. The new narrative is ultimately an old one, for it is the one upon which the United States was originally founded: individual liberty, personal responsibility, and limited government that ruled at the consent of the governed.
We have drifted far, far away from our ancient moorings. But now, as then, the answer is freedom. The solution is not more government, but less.
Be aware of the dangers of governmental funding.
Become creative in seeking local solutions.
Express to elected officials that the obtaining of funding is not success, but the securing of liberty is.
Good government needs good people... stay involved... attend that meeting... run for that office.
And pray... for the addiction is far reaching and deeply rooted in all our institutions and in the minds of the People.