In the late 1950s there was a TV show called “Father Knows Best” starring Robert Young who played “a thoughtful father who offered sage advice whenever one or more of his children had a problem.” Today there is another long-running show called “Government Knows Best” where our President and members of Congress play the part of thoughtful leaders who provide sage advice through legislation to solve our country’s problems. In this show the public is viewed as their naïve uninformed children who need to be helped and guided by their all-wise “parents.”
However, this show is a comedy because everything our government does seems to go wrong. Take the “Cash for Clunkers” episode. This program was meant to help stimulate car sales, but it not only failed to do that, but the government failed to pay for the traded-in cars because of red tape. Even so, the government still spent millions of dollars, but the program didn’t generate any money to pay for it. In another episode the government told their children that the country was going to collapse without immediately spending $700 billion, and yet two years later a little more than half of that money has been spent and the country has become worse than the government said would happen if they didn’t spend their children’s money.
The premise of this show is that the government is composed of a bunch of bungling fools who think they are the wisest people on earth. What makes this so funny is that most of them are lawyers who have had very little actual experience in running a business – any business – so they don’t know what they’re doing. They tell their children that their latest program will cost very little but will provide them with huge benefits and – like the naive children the public is portrayed as – they believe their leaders each and every time.
But, before long each government program begins to get out of control as costs rise far beyond what was originally projected, fraud and waste run rampant, and soon, instead of the program making things better for their children, it makes things worse. Therefore, the government once again tries to figure out how to solve the problem they created as their children cry for help, but when they come up with a new solution, it only creates more problems.
Unfortunately, this show is not on TV. It’s happening to us in real life. However, instead of this being a comedy, it’s a horror show.
