Government Shutdown? Huh? I Never Noticed - The Increasing Irrelevance Of Washington

'What about the poor?', said one of the minions seated around the table at the offices of Scientists for Social Responsibility.  'How will they manage?'

Of course the poor will manage quite well with the conservative reforms proposed by the President.  No more food stamps, Aid to Dependent Children, and other unaccountable welfare programs.  In their place will be cash transfers with strict entry and exit criteria. Like the military - move up or move out - welfare beneficiaries will either have to find employment or fend for themselves. 

Worker training, inclusive education, pre-school programs?  Already vocational trade schools are making profitable deals with private corporations - train potential workers, and we will hire them.  Taxpayer money is increasingly irrelevant in a new era of public-private partnership.  

Investment in programs of self-esteem, multiple intelligences, and diversity?  Gone in a return to basic education.  The public school system will be reduced to bare bones through the expansion of the voucher system - cash transfers to ambitious parents who seek private education in place of taxpayer funding of perennially failing schools. 

Health? No country's health care system is more private than America's.  Labor?  A matter of supply and demand, labor and capital in a free market.  Energy? A private enterprise with oil and gas companies competing on the world market and freed from restrictive government regulation able to explore and develop different energy sources.  Agriculture?  Another intensely competitive international enterprise in no need of wasteful subsidies and artificial price supports. 

The Post Office - a dinosaur in the era of electronic business, and nothing more than a transit point for junk mail.  Roads and bridges?  Already private companies are investing in and profiting from highways and connectors.  The new Tappan Zee Bridge and the Washington Greenway were privately financed.  Social Security?  That too will be privatized and return responsibility for retirement investment to the private citizen. The list goes on.  Up and down Independence Avenue government departments will be eliminated and no one will notice.

What about the national parks?  Is there no value in publicly protected land?  For what? Millions of tourists clustered around Old Faithful waiting for an eruption and the rest of Yellowstone empty?  Millions more having a quick look at the Grand Canyon and then headed for home? The national parks are nothing more than environmental Disneylands.  In the era of virtual reality when computer-generated experiences are far more direct, intimate, and personal than the real thing could ever be, the national parks, quickly seen as drags on the limited federal budget, will be turned over to more profitable private logging and mining. 

The few hikers and old-fashioned John Muir/Thoreau naturalist dreamers can find plenty of open spaces elsewhere to satisfy them. 

Public funding directly in the national interest - Defense - will continue.  In fact that is the only proviso written into the Constitution.  All the rest - the government, bureaucratic behemoth - was created willy-nilly by entitled politicians.  The growth of big government, a legacy of Wilson, Roosevelt, and Johnson, has become the norm and the lifeblood of the Democratic party. Progressivism relies on the mechanisms of government to take taxpayer money, recycle it into meaningless, inefficient, and useless programs, and claim the viability of the caretaker state. 

While the current government shutdown continues, the President makes good on his promises to eliminate positions - not just jobs, but the civil service niches which have been created to perpetuate bureaucratic service.  Let the shutdown continue, says the President to Democrats.  The longer you hold out, the more I will reduce the size, influence, and importance of government. 

There have been government shutdowns before, the result of a divided Congress, business as usual in the staring contest of ambitious men; but they have not lasted long, and things always went back to normal. This time, however, the rules of the game have changed.  Go absent and your treasured, protected government will be gone when you return, says the President. 

Government exists because the powerful ruling elites do not trust the people who have elected them.  Government is the instrument of concentrated political control.  It is an arrogation of political, economic, financial, and moral authority.  The 'people' are unwashed rubes, backwoods crackers, bass boat, gunrack, squirrel hunting ignoramuses who can't even tie their shoes. Government has lost its representativeness and become nothing but an agency for self-perpetuation and the profligate spending to keep it in power. 

Progressives have never ever considered the possibility of government actually be reduced let alone eliminated.  Big government has been a given, a fait accompli, an absolute truth for decades.  Every morning it will still be there, and every year it will be bigger and more important. 

Now, these same progressives wake up to Morning In America only to find whole agencies gone, disappeared, never again to return.  USAID, one of the most inefficient, fanciful, unrealistic, intellectually barren agencies of government was ransacked, its bureaucrats thrown out and left on the curb, its reams of files and documentation of fraud, abuse, and mismanagement collected and filed. 

The demise of big government is ipso facto the demise of progressivism.  Without the bottomless government treasury at their disposal, progressives have nothing. Whereas conservatives have principle and an originalist grounding - freedom, independence, individuality, tradition, patriotism, and faith - progressives have only secular programs - giveaways, feelgood benefits, walkin' around money, promises of a better life through government assistance. 

It is no wonder that the Democratic Party is at sixes and sevens, nonplussed, politically knackered and lost.  Losing government is losing their raison d'etre, their political base, the operational headquarters. 

The shutdown of government was unsettling for the minions at Scientists for Social Responsibility.  They had no one to call, no one to lobby for projects, funds, and support.  If their agency of choice ceased to exist, what would they do?  Where would they go?  They had bet their whole life on doing good, on using public largesse to help others.  Now, not only would they have no funds and no organizational home, the whole do-good industry would cease to exist.  It would be fend for yourself in a dog-eat-dog world. 

'Sorry about that', said the new generation of conservative activists come to Washington, the last kick in the pants to these lifelong progressives who had never even imagined a world without government, a chaotic, free-for-all; and here it was ushered in by a lot of blonde bimbos and Iowa airheads, running up and down Pennsylvania Avenue in frilly skirts and flip hairdos on their way to Capitol Hill and the White House. 

Morning In America was the slogan of Ronald Reagan, the man who shook Washington with his words, 'Government is not the solution; government is the problem', and now his successor, a man of bloody determination and Genghis Khan ambition, was about to do what Reagan followers had been hoping for half a century.  Get rid of the whole bloody lot, the whole kit-and-caboodle, every last bit of it.