Everything sounds like propaganda

I like Peggy Noonan as a writer and essayist. She is immensely competent as a storyteller and regardless whether you agree with her point or argument, it is easy to enjoy her literary style.

I also like her because she views the world inversely to my proclivities. I come across an issue and I want to know the magnitude and the measures, the causations and the context; give me the numbers, give the facts. There is a place for the storyline but it usually is subordinate to the facts.

Noonan is an insightful thinker. She appears to prioritize the anecdote and the storyline above the facts. She gains great insight from experiences and anecdotes long before the evidence shows up in the data. In The New Bureaucratic Brazenness by Peggy Noonan she captures an issue I have been concerned about for a number of years now. It is not just that the government grows ever larger - there is always well-intentioned and legitimate debate about the scope and appropriateness of government responsibilities. It is not just that the government appears less and less competent as it deals with larger and more complex problems - complex systems are a challenge for everyone.

I think Noonan hits the nail on the head. It is about trust. Everybody is self-protecting; government, NGO, private enterprise, individuals. But confident deceit on the part of government employees when combined with scope creep and incompetence is a pretty rich mix to stomach.

But does anybody in the government feel it is necessary to be truthful about anything anymore? Does anyone in the federal government ever think about concepts like "taxpayers" and "citizens" and their "right to know"?

Everything sounds like propaganda. That will happen when government becomes too huge, too present and all-encompassing. Everything almost every level of government says now has the terrible, insincere, lying sound of The Official Line, which no one on the inside, or outside, believes. The other day, during the big Centers for Disease Control news conference on the Dallas Ebola case, a man from one of the health agencies insisted in burly (and somehow self-satisfied) tones that the nation's health is his group's No. 1 priority. And I thought, just like a normal person, "No, your No. 1 priority is to forestall a sense of panic. To do that you'll say what you need to say. Your second priority, connected to the first, is to assert the excellence and competence of the agency with which you are associated. Your third priority is to keep the public safe."

Everybody understands the cynical discussions about Global Warming, War on Women, Rape Epidemic, Fast and Furious, Benghazi, Gender Wage Gap, Chemical Red Lines, NSA spying, IRS selective persecution, 24 crashed hard drives and counting, etc. All wonderful partisan talking points unsupported or flat out refuted by evidence and data. But do politicians and government employees understand just how great is the price every time they parrot some wrong or unsupported talking point in order to win some tactical gain at the expense of a strategic loss?

The US is a high trust country compared to most in the world and it is part of what makes us so tolerant and productive. Just what happens when we no longer trust our public servants, our representatives, to do what is right and to look after the interests of our country and our fellow citizens. As Noonan observes: "Everything sounds like propaganda."

A nation can't continue to be vibrant and healthy when the government controls more and more, and yet no one trusts a thing the government says. It's hard to keep going that way.