Theft at the Public Till
what our professional experts have done to win political support: Medicare, welfare, farm subsidies, the Tennessee Valley Authority and on and on. (The bosses, incidentally, opposed entitlements because it undermined their patronage power.) That waste is measured in the hundreds of billions, not millions, of dollars. There’s a good case to be made that the country would be better off today if lawmakers stuck to enriching themselves. Even the most profligate bunch of congressmen couldn’t put away $1.5 trillion (our current federal budget) on fancy cars, luxurious houses and exotic vacations. But our current breed of politicians more sober and less openly venal than their predecessors-have no problem dreaming up schemes to hand over one seventh of the economy to “policy planners.” What’s worse, the politicos seem congenitally unable to level with the public about what they’re doing. Thus taxes become “revenue enhancement,” rationing becomes “cost con- tainment” and quotas become “goals.” 1984 is here, ten years later. What’s worse honest graft or dishonest social engineering? In order to reinvent government properly, the purposes, duties and pri- orities of departments and agencies have to be re-examined from scratch. The government has to ask what it does best, and where it is unnecessary. Sometimes - indeed, almost always - whole cultures will need changing.
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