LETTER FROM THE EDITOR
F or people like me who consider themselves to be libertarian, the 35- day “government shutdown” at the beginning of this year was a real be-careful- what-you wish-for moment. What I had in mind was more like cabinet members and congressmen going to the payday lender, senators sleeping under bridges, and the president of the United States selling his wife’s Manolo Blahniks on eBay to pay the Domino’s delivery boy at state dinners. Instead, what we got was very crabby unpaid TSA agents who would have done a strip search on me right in the middle of the airport if there hadn’t been a whole line of people at the security checkpoint begging not to see me naked. We got Yellowstone National Park rangers pawning the bears to make car payments. National Gallery curators chalking pictures on the sidewalk hoping somebody would drop a quarter in their hats. Grade-school field trips to Washington where the closest the kids got to a tour of the Capitol Building was looking at a picture of it on the back of the $50 bills that lobbyists charge per minute. Because lobbyists weren’t closed for business. And neither were the other high muck-a- mucks who actually move the levers and work the pulleys of government – the Earls of Entitlement Spending, the Dukes of Deficit, the Nabobs of National Debt, the Magnates of Un-funded Mandates.
Government shutdown? Our government is so bad at doing everything that it can’t even do nothing right. And how did our government get so bad? Bad politics. But how did our politics get to be so bad? Simple. Politics grew worse because politics grew. Sometimes when things grow it’s good – like when the grown kids finally move out of the house. But sometimes when things grow... It’s a growth ... It’s a tumor... Right now, we have a gigantic political tumor. And I’m not optimistic about the biopsy. The growth of politics is the opposite of the growth of liberty. The growth of politics kills the growth of liberty. When liberty grows, we get the expansion of free enterprise and free markets. We create more goods, services, and benefits to society. The pie gets bigger. But politics is not about creating more goods, services, and benefits to society. Politics is about dividing them up.
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When liberty grows, the pie gets bigger. When politics grows, the slices get smaller.
American Consequences
7
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