Butchering The Behemoth
By Ryan Walsh (11/18/04)
Amid election seasons, candidates often talk of "dealing with the deficit." Yet, once elected, they do nothing. It’s like the kid in school who claims that if an armed attacker were to rush into the classroom, he would be the first to wrestle the scumbag to the ground, saving the defenseless teacher and fearful students. But most likely, as his classmates acknowledge, he’d be the first to curl into a fetal position under his desk and cry for his mother.
It’s not as though shrinking the federal government is difficult in the theoretical realm; the difficulty lies in actually pushing through permanent changes while enduring flanking fire from entrenched Washington lobbyists and recusant single-issue interest groups. Just imagine some senator proposing legislation that would terminate the IRS and our current Byzantine tax code. The next day, IRS cubicle-dwellers and private tax lawyers across the country would take up arms and form angry mobs around Capitol Hill. Even further, imagine the same senator sponsoring a partial repeal of Medicare or Social Security. He’d have the local chapter of Hell’s Grannies, armed with knives and brass knuckles, knocking down his door.
Nevertheless, in case a brave representative ever decides to weather the perilous waters of government reform, a particular policy paper must become his bible. It’s called "Downsizing the Federal Government," and it’s written by the libertarian Cato Institute’s director of fiscal studies, Chris Edwards. Down to the last infinitesimal detail, Edwards lays out a budget proposal that would shave a whole $300 billion in federal spending while both keeping the Bush tax cuts intact and eliminating the deficit. For the most part, he accomplishes this without touching money earmarked for defense and homeland security.
What is his method? He told "National Review’s" John J. Miller that he and other analysts "took a structural view of the problem. We decided that there are several categories of unnecessary spending. A lot of it is simply wasteful, which we defined as all things the General Accounting Office or other auditors have described as fraudulent, duplicative, obsolete, mismanaged, or ineffective. We also looked for cases of federal spending that represent unjustified redistribution, damage the economy, perform a state or local function, or should be privatized."
He targets some federal grants to state and local governments, which altogether total $418 billion. The Tennessee Valley Authority and the U.S. Postal Service, in his view, could be more efficiently run in the private sector and should thus be cut. Miller notes that Edwards and other Cato Institute experts "aren't afraid to go after sacred cows, like the Department of Education (gone!), Head Start (gone!), and farm subsidies (gone!). They also ax medical research, Amtrak, the Post Office, NASA, the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Peace Corps, the Small Business Administration, and TANF (i.e., welfare for ‘needy families’)."
As President Reagan declared in his farewell address, "Man is not free unless government is limited. There’s a clear cause and effect here that is as neat and predictable as the law of physics: As government expands, liberty contracts."
That is the prime danger of Big Government, and that is what liberals are hopelessly incapable of comprehending. Although it probably wasn’t her intention, Hillary Clinton once revealed her socialistic proclivity in a speech on the Bush tax cuts. Speaking on behalf of the Democratic Party at large, she said, "We're saying that for America to get back on track, we're probably going to cut [the tax cut] short and not give it to you. We're going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good" (emphasis mine).
A limited constitutional government or an unchecked socialist nanny-state—the founders chose the former unanimously. Shouldn’t we follow suit?
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