How you gonna keep 'em down on the farm?

We know for certain that the Conservative crime bill will not reduce crime. We know for certain that it will cost billions of dollars. In every culturally similar context, efforts to reduce crime by putting more people in prison, even where that system of incarceration attempts to include rehabilitation programs, does nothing to reduce crime (in many cases it increases crime) and raises costs by so much that eventually it threatens the jurisdiction with bankruptcy. Prisons are a way for the state to spend billions in the creation of a criminal training programe.

And the evidence against Harper and his fascist cohorts is mounting everyday, and now even Texas has lined up against our Government's program. So we have to ask ourselves, 'why does this government want to spend billions of dollars on something that they know won't reduce crime, may actually increase criminal activity, and will eventually threaten the country with bankruptcy?' I believe that the answer is fairly clear; the Conservatives want to bankrupt the state, pure and simple. And the reason that they seek to bankrupt the nation is that it will eventually destroy social programs, the thing that Conservatives despise the most. For many years crime rates were going down, literacy rates were falling, social programs were keeping people from starvation and total desperation. But Conservatives hate government sponsored social programs so much that they would do anything to destroy them, even send the country into bankruptcy. The only kind of government program the conservatives want to maintain are those that take money from the people and put it in the hands of corporations and the rich.

Of course, all of this begs another question; why do conservative leaders want people to be poor and uneducated? Well, for the same reason that the rich and powerful have always wanted the people to be poor and uneducated - because they are easier to control. When great English reformers, such as Samuel Whitbread and Lord Erskine, actively advocated for nationally sponsored, primary education, Tories argued against them in the House of Commons by essentially maintaining that if you gave the working-class education they would only become dissatisfied with their place in society and would demand more from life. Most conservatives essentially believe that they will be part of the wealthy elite and the last thing they want is a society in which everyone has an education and a basic level of income because they want to be able to use their wealth to wield power over others, it is their way of feeling better about themselves and convincing themselves that their power is a result of their merit. This problem goes back centuries. The Catholic Church and the leaders of European feudalism actively kept people ignorant and hungry because they knew that such people were easier to control. In many countries during the age of the slave-trade, it was illegal to teach slaves to read because even slave-owners knew that knowledge is power.

The equation is simple; spend bilions on useless aspects of the police state, gradually bankrupt the state and have a ready made excuse to take money out of health, education, and other social programs, end up with an ignorant, hungry, desperate population that will do what they are told.

So next time you scratch your head in exasperation at the apparent stupidity of the Conservative effort to spend billions building more prisons, just remember it is not that they don't understand the facts, it is because they want an ignorant, desperate, hungry, population that understands that they should obey their economic masters. That is what it is all about.