If you’ve been watching the news, you know that New Jersey has recently been embroiled (yet again) in local and state-level political corruption.
The Wall Street Journal published a piece yesterday that ties this corruption in NJ to the cankering influence of Big Government programs and policies and also highlights the malaise the state is suffering as its Big Government programs make war on Small Businesses.
It’s worth the read, and is a case study on where the country is headed. We already have a pretty good case study in California where 7% of the US population lives, yet where 32% of Welfare recipients reside and where the Big Government there has squandered all prosperity it once had.
Read the article for the details of the whole sordid case study. Here are the key conclusions:
Big Government is why New Jersey created only 6,800 private sector jobs from 2000 to 2007—while public sector jobs grew by more than 55,800. Big Government is the reason New Jersey ranks as the worst of 50 states on the Small Business Survival Index. And Big Government is a leading reason New Jersey has a “corruption problem” that an FBI agent at Friday’s press conference characterized as “one of the worst, if not the worst, in the nation.”
Sandy McClure, co-author of the book “The Soprano State: New Jersey’s Culture of Corruption,” agrees that big government is a big reason behind the state’s corruption problem. “You have all these little authorities that everyone has to go to for permission,” she says. “Too much government means too many opportunities for officials looking to cash in. And there’s no way that the press can keep track of it all.”
Ms. McClure is right: The more extensive government’s reach, the more opportunities the governing class has to steal from and shake down the productive class …
…The point is that politicians and officials have more to sell in an environment of high taxes, big spending and overregulation—the same things that help explain New Jersey’s anemic economic growth and job creation. When government gets too big and complicated for businesses to get their permits and approvals and funding honestly, the dishonest prosper. And the honest get fed up and flee.”
Big Government fails everywhere it is tried. Where does your state rank on the Small Business Survival Index? Any correlation you’d notice with Big Government’s influence?
Please subscribe to our RSS feed and our newsletter, and join our Facebook group.
July 29th, 2009 at 7:40 pm
I’m in New York…only problem we have is governors and hookers…LOL…
August 14th, 2009 at 1:49 pm
The worst thing about government corruption is that distorted public perception allows it to thrive. We are always told it’s a few bad apples, or it’s just one guy, or they got the group of them and then wrote a bunch of laws to ensure it’ll never happen again. As anybody who has worked for the government knows, this is simply not the case. Thanks to the miles of red tape, office politics, and maze of legislation, any plate of government pie has a thousand hands in it (even the confidential, secret, and top secret work).
It doesn’t just take one criminal mastermind or one corrupt petty official to make a scandal happen. It also takes dozens of others who were complicit, participating, or turned a blind eye. If you think about how the numbers work out, you realize that a huge chunk of the government is somehow involved in corruption at any point in time – and that’s just based on the people who actually get caught, which is no simple matter.