More Government Less Personal Responsibility

 

There is a contradiction at the heart of modern politics. We complain that life is too expensive, that taxes are too high, that businesses charge too much — and yet the moment something goes wrong, the instinct is the same: the government should do something. Regulate it, license it, inspect it, subsidize it, create an agency for it. Then we wonder why everything costs more.

Consider the difference between a few families buying a cow together, having it butchered, and dividing the meat, versus buying meat through the commercial food system. The first is a simple chain: farmer, cow, butcher, families. The second passes through layers of licensing, inspection, labelling, and record-keeping — all of it staffed by people who must be paid, either through taxes or through the prices businesses pass on to customers. Either way, we pay.

What About Health and Safety?

Regulation clearly has benefits, and nobody serious wants contaminated food or unsafe slaughterhouses. But the real question isn't whether regulation helps — it's how much is needed, at what cost, and who should bear the remaining risk. A handful of families sharing a cow from a farmer they know is not the same risk profile as a company processing thousands of kilograms of meat for anonymous buyers across a province. "Safety" shouldn't be a word that shuts down every conversation about cost and proportionality.

Outsourcing Responsibility

This pattern extends far beyond meat. If something is risky, we regulate it; if it's expensive, we subsidize it; if people make poor choices, we build a program around it. Each demand sounds reasonable in isolation, but stacked together they produce an enormous administrative structure whose costs spread through the whole economy — and then we complain about the cost of living. The more responsibility individuals hand over, the more institutions must assume, and institutions are never free.

There Is No Free Government

Government doesn't have its own money — it draws resources from the economy through taxes, fees, borrowing, and other means. So the question is never simply "would this be useful?" Almost anything can be useful. The real question is whether it's useful enough to justify its cost. A regulation that cuts a risk from 1 in 10,000 to 1 in 100,000 while adding millions in compliance costs might be worth it — or it might not. Invoking public safety doesn't answer that trade-off; good government means weighing risk against cost, not pretending risk can be erased for free.

The Regulation Paradox

Large corporations can absorb complex regulation with lawyers and compliance departments; the neighbourhood butcher cannot. Rules meant to protect ordinary people can end up protecting incumbents instead, shrinking competition and raising prices — after which we ask government to investigate why everything is so expensive, and it answers with another regulation. The circle continues.

Maybe We Should Try the Socialism We Keep Asking For

There's a growing appetite for government to manage more of everyday life — housing, childcare, food, energy, wages, healthcare — while simultaneously demanding lower taxes and cheaper goods. Something has to give. Perhaps we should get the expansive government we keep asking for: let it regulate more, subsidize more, administer more — and then send us the bill. Maybe feeling the full cost is the only way to understand the trade-off.

This isn't an argument for no government; regulation and public institutions serve legitimate purposes. But there must also be room for judgment, voluntary association, and personal responsibility — room for five adults to look at a cow, buy it, process it safely, share it, and accept responsibility for their own decision. A free society cannot promise adults freedom while building an institution to shield them from every consequence of exercising it.

The more responsibility we hand to government, the more government we will require. And the more government we require, the more somebody has to pay for it. That somebody is us.