Perhaps the most cogent take away message from the shut down, however, is that it helped to illustrate the fact that we really and truly don’t need the level of government that we have. We could cut a lot out of what we’re paying for, and still be just fine. If the government has to go out of its way to purposefully make the shutdown more hurtful than it otherwise, then this suggests that the federal government doesn’t need to be doing a lot of these things anywise. If the government can allocate excess personnel to barricade monuments that normally were open access and had no attendants, then this suggests that many of the National Park Service personnel who were apparently so under-utilized that they were free to harass World War II veterans could stand to be cut from the payroll. If the states are able to operate national parks at their own expense, as several were, then do we really even need a National Park Service to begin with? Why not just devolve national parks back to the states or to private hands? Going further, why don’t we just devolve all federal lands back to the states, other than the ones, such as military bases, which actually have a constitutional basis for existing? The government shutdown ought to bring questions like this to the forefront of the minds of any thinking person. What else could be cut that doesn’t affect our lives, and only serves to pick our pockets? Maybe instead of having 20 programs that do the same thing, we could streamline them down to one, eliminate the excess, and save taxpayer monies? Maybe we don’t even need that one program, if it’s not constitutionally allowed? Maybe the NSA and the IRS and other alphabet agencies could stand a trip to the gym to lose some of their fat? If conservatives were smart, they would purvey the shutdown into a forceful argument for cutting spending – and not just on the failed ObamaCare program. It’s time to make that case.
Posted on: Sat, 19 Oct 2013 10:47:55 +0000