Whatever good, well-meaning ideas get adopted, the bad guys co-opt them, distort, deplete, complicate, turn inside out, and use them for their own purposes.

Want a program to help poor women support their kids? They turn it into an excuse to allow the police to rummage through dresser drawers looking for drugs and boyfriend's clothing.

Want free education for all? They turn it into a tool of indoctrination and authoritarianism -- a way to instill fear, to homogenize the consumers, and to develop a ranked, hopeless futility in the many or a sense of elitist entitlement in the few. To kill the confidence or ability of any children who might be inclined towards an "independent livelihood".

Want federal funding for schools in poor states? They turn it into a useful tool for blackmailing all states -- i.e., forcing them to open the doors for military recruiters etc.

Anything the government DOES give you the individual will be at a cost to you of jumping through hoops, suffering the indignity of bureaucrats questioning your integrity, lifestyle, work ethic, etc.

At this point in our history, possibly it is true that everything that grows the federal government is growing the empire.
It may have started as a symbiotic relationship, but it is now akin to a cancer, funneling most of our money into wars for profit and into better tools for controlling and mining the citizenry. Bureaucracies set up for good purposes -- like the FDA -- become tools to dole out the nation's resources to the chosen few and to complicate the regulations JUST enough to make small businesses pay a heavy price for existence while large or favored businesses can often use them as a means to tilt the playing field.

Nearly all big government programs get turned into favors for specific companies -- who decides who gets the contracts? -- and therefore a means to build more power for those in power. Power flows to power, and large corporations are inevitably favored, and they buttress a pyramidal system where those on the bottom layer aren't seen as individuals but as replaceable lumps of rock. There is still a symbiotic relationship between those corporate owners and the political winners in government. They make each other powerful, and they don't need ordinary people except as docile sheep and consumers.

The "ordinary people" used to run their own groceries, bookstores, carpenter services, diners -- and work for themselves. Many of the skills that people have today are only useable in the context of a large corporation; and most of the old skills and services -- like hairdresser, grocer, shoe salesman -- have been subsumed into multinational corporations.

"A guy like you" is probably resourceful and talented, but you are having to "root around for every buck" because the new economy has become akin to a rigid, centrally-planned economy with no plan for the individuals who get squeezed out of their assigned place in the pyramid, just a plan to make sure that money and power keeps moving upward. Cash is liquid, but human beings aren't.

It is terrible how the faceless bureaucracy is making life so complicated -- your car registration has expired? what would that even mean in a sane world?? -- which can be either a mild annoyance or a major trauma, depending on whether one has money. I hope you find a way out of your current situation. You will. Believe in tomorrow and in yourself and in the love of your wife and child, who are real flesh-and-blood people that you CAN count on. We need ideas on how to build safety nets again from the bottom up, like the way some are doing in Latin America -- and ideas on how to re-create an economy that is locally based and more open to resourceful human beings.