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"Government is not reason; it is not eloquence. It is force. Like fire it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master." -- George Washington "If we were directed from Washington when to sow and when to reap, we would soon want for bread." -- Thomas Jefferson Also check out the Next Ten Deckchairs! Introduction Until recently, I haven't given a shit about politics. I've always called myself a Republican, mostly because that's what my parents were. (Although, to their everlasting embarrassment, they voted for Bobby Kennedy in the 1968 California primary the night he was assassinated - don't mention it to them.) My mother, however, was always a liberal (in the old sense of the word), especially when it came to victimless crimes, like prostitution and gambling. She never understood why anything between consenting adults which doesn't harm anyone else should be illegal, and she impressed that logic on me from an early age. When pressed, I would call myself a "Rockefeller Republican," which I always took to be sort of a leftish, socially conscious conservative. Obviously, I always felt a little bit out of the mainstream in this regard, especially since the fundamentalists took over the Republican Party in the 1980s and the party moved to the right. That's the problem with a two-party system - you get into the "personality cult" mindset. You're expected to support "the party," regardless of whatever clown they put up for office. When Nixon looked more and more guilty, when Ford pardoned Nixon, when the party kept nominating the same useless hack as my congressional candidate year after year, whenever Reagan would wander off into the murkier aspects of his soul, I gritted my teeth and supported them. If you didn't support the Republicans, the thinking goes in the bipolar ghetto of American politics, you must be a Democrat. In the '80s, I also developed a concern over the size of the Government - not so much out of fear of their increasing power, but simply as a taxpayer paying higher and higher taxes. (Also, I have a special interest in the federal government - I've been a fed since 1977, and in fact am a fifth-generation bureaucrat.) Reagan talked about making government smaller and getting it off our backs, then proceeded to grow the government at a truly astonishing rate. I didn't know why, or what the alternative was, but it was obvious that the government was eating us alive, while at the same time becoming more and more irrelevant to our everyday lives. By 1991, I'd had enough. I was disgusted with the sight of the Democrats and Republicans fighting for the sake of fighting, involving themselves in endless ad hominum attacks on each other, and the resulting gridlock which brought any kind of responsible governing to a complete standstill. When Congress actually got into a debate about something (flag burning, patriotism, Nannygate, etc.), it was always over irrelevant issues, the shouting resembling my kids arguing over what color cup they get with lunch. On the major issues, the issues that matter, on the other hand, either Congress was afraid to discuss it (Social Security being the main secret topic), or there was basically no difference in the parties. As Cleveland Amory once said, "The only difference between the Democrats and Republicans is that the Democrats are communists and the Republicans are socialists." I ended up voting for Ross Perot in 1992, the first time I had ever voted for a third-party candidate. It wasn't so much that I wanted Perot as president, but I could not bring myself to vote for the major parties. Of course, Perot was pretty much of a nut, but remember: Perot got 19 percent of the votes, an absolutely remarkable figure given his on-again, off-again candidacy and his obvious mental problems. It was good to know that others had the same ill-defined discomfort with the two-party system. I had looked at the Libertarian candidate before I voted for Perot. I had always known of the LP as the party of dope-smoking conservatives, of shaggy guys in bad suits arguing about whether to privatize the sewer system, of stunning inconsequentiality. I hunted down the 1992 candidate, Andre Marrou, on some cable channel, and in the three seconds before I plunged into a snoring coma, I was singularly unimpressed. So I ended up with Perot. Also, in 1992, I did two things which sent me on my anti-government journey: I read Parliament of Whores by P.J. O'Rourke, and I started working for the US Department of Agriculture. One illustrated the idiocy of government through examples; the other showed it to me in real life. The final straw with the status quo and the two-party system, for me, was in the 1996 Presidential debate, when Bob Dole pointed to Bill Clinton and accused him of wanting to grow the government at a rate of 5% a year. "I propose," Bob said, "to grow the government at only 3% a year." This is what it's come to - two big-government whores arguing over the number of angels on a pin. I just turned off the TV and drank half a bottle of Laphroaig. I finally came to the Libertarian party through, of all things, National Public Radio. The Monday after the '96 Libertarian convention, their candidate, Harry Browne, had a 30-second sound bite, talking about how government doesn't work (the title of his latest book, incidently). Sitting at my desk, I surfed over to the LP web site, read one chapter of his book, and was converted then and there. Among other things, the Libertarian Party advocates getting the federal government out of all functions that aren't specifically included in the Constitution. That's pretty much everything, except national defense, the federal courts and maybe some of the Treasury Department. (My God, no more Battlefield Monuments Commission? No more Mohair Subsidy Board? No more selling liquor to Indians? Are these people nuts?) They quite rightly point out that 10th Amendment states that all functions not listed in the Constitution itself are reserved to the states or to the people. (The Government Printing Office apparently left this one out of the copies of the Constitution they print up for the Congress and the Supreme Court, but the libertarians managed to snag a copy of it for us.) Glancing through the Government Organization Manual, you can find a million moronic offices, bureaus and departments that we could lose tomorrow without anyone noticing. Some offices, however, graced with better PR staffs and some sympathetic press, have fostered the illusion that they are actually serving the public and doing some good. Here are some of those functions, and the reasons why we can, indeed, live day to day without them. On the day after the ValuJet crash in the Everglades, I saw the Inspector General of the FAA on a Sunday morning news show, stating that she thought that all of the "discount" airlines were inherently unsafe and that she only flew on major airlines. Excuse me? If the IG of the FAA thought that, why the hell didn't she tell us? Isn't it the FAA's job to let us know such things? Well, no. I did a little research, and found that the FAA has the schizophrenic mission of 1) promoting air safety; and 2) promoting US-carrier air travel. If this seems contradictory to you -- well, you're right. If one side of the agency comes out and says "Don't fly ValuJet," the other side screams bloody murder about decreased air revenues. If the promotion side pushes more vacations and business travel, the maintenance side gets swamped, and a planeful of people get eaten by crocodiles. (The FAA doesn't actually do any maintenance, just like the USDA doesn't actually inspect most beef; they merely set the standards and the industry does the actual work.) Well, we don't need the government to promote US air travel -- I think the airlines themselves do a pretty good job of that. And I think that a private, non-profit organization, similar to Underwriter's Laboratory or the ISO, would do a much more efficient, cost-effective and timely job of setting aircraft maintenance standards, without the political compromises and filibustering that always goes with professional politicians pretending that they know something. (Just try sitting through a Senate or House hearing on any topic -- the ignorance and posturing is appalling.) But what if there was no FAA? Wouldn't there be more crashes of badly maintained planes because the airlines would cut back on safety in order to make more money? Come on. Just ask ValuJet or Air Florida how much money they're making now. Airlines don't want to crash any more than you do. In the absence of the FAA, the airlines would have to convince the non-profit watchdogs -- and, more importantly, you -- that they are safe to fly. And I guarantee you, the non-profits would not hesitate a second to come out and state what the FAA's IG was afraid to -- that this airline or that airline is unsafe, and you shouldn't fly it. Then we would be free to make our own decisions about air carriers. The world, as always, is a caveat emptor place, and the FAA, with their unwillingness to criticize the airline industry, is just herding us into deadly airplanes with a false sense of security. No department has a better image with the average citizen than the USDA. They are seen as the champion of the small farmer, the main reason that US food surpluses continue each year, and the finest example of altruism in the federal budget. To speak ill of the USDA is to spit on Willie Nelson and all the hardscrabble little farmers from coast to coast, toiling from sunup to sundown to make sure we eat well. Well, not really. On closer examination, the department reminds me of the beautiful spirit that rises out of the Lost Ark, only to turn into a leering skull and melt everyone. USDA is the most bloated, inefficient and useless organization in the government, bar none. (And that's quite an accomplishment.) They spend $82 billion a year -- that's not a typo, $82 billion -- messing with our food supply and prices, in a perfectly Soviet fashion, with the following results:
So, in general, USDA spends $12 billion jacking up produce prices, and another $20 billion jacking them back down through food stamps. So where's the other $50 billion, not to mention the $8 billion disparity in the above figures? I don't know -- and the scary part is, the USDA doesn't know either. Somewhere between the Grain Inspection, Packers and Stockyard Administration, the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, the Food Safety and Inspection Service and the others, it's pissed away like grain leaking from a silo. All of these functions could be performed better and cheaper commercially with user fees, or better yet, not performed at all. And the kicker is, USDA doesn't perform any of them anyway -- they spend all that money making rules for the producers to follow. Did you think the USDA actually inspects most beef? Silly you. And what good do all those rules do you? Consider -- up until the Clinton goons came on the scene, there were no federal standards for the inspection of seafood, an inherently more dangerous item than beef and grain, and yet the free markets seemed to do a pretty good job of making sure we didn't drop dead from food poisoning. Jack-in-the-Box wasn't serving crabcakes, y'know. Can someone please explain to me what the Department of Energy does? And then can you explain it to them? You know what bugs me most about the Department of Education? Is it the fact that, despite their name, they haven't educated anyone in anything? No. Is it that it's run by a bunch of University of Chicago ivory-tower thesis writers who have to wear a cork on top of their heads to keep from accidentally stabbing their spouses at night? No. Is it that their wrong-headed, counter-productive ideas on how to educate children are adopted by our neighborhood schools not because they are right, but because the schools are threatened with the loss of federal funds -- funds that shouldn't exist in the first place? No. Is it their bizarre fascination for using ever-higher dollars-per-student ratios as a measure of success, when there is no evidence at all that more money equates to smarter kids? No. Is it even the obvious fact that you can date the start of our national decline in education from the moment this collection of academic ne'er-do-wells was founded, and that even an American high school graduate should realize that they are not the cure for bad scores and stupid kids, but the cause itself? Not even that. The reason I most hate the Department of Education is that they recently moved into the old NASA headquarters at 7th and Independence Avenue in Washington, the same building from which true heroes sent man to the moon and guided the exploration of the cosmos. The notion that Jim Webb's and Tom Paine's offices are now home to some idiots who think that teaching cultural divisiveness -- I'm sorry, diversity -- is more important than phonics is pretty sad. But not as sad as what these clowns are doing to our children. Take phonics. Phonics fell out of favor about 20 years ago -- not among teachers and parents and folks like that, folks that matter, but among the academic types who care more about getting some new silly-ass theory published than educating children. Phonics were deemed hopelessly provincial and archaic, and too difficult for inner-city kids to learn. ("Helping" the poor by treating them like they're idiots is pretty standard in government programs.) So phonics were replaced by the "whole word" method, in which the kids are expected to memorize by sight about 200 new words each school year until they enter high school with their wonderful 1800-word vocabulary. (Those of you without kids -- as Dave Barry always says, I'm not making this up.) In addition to keeping the kids stupid and denying them most books, this method has the wonderful advantage -- from the school boards' point of view -- of requiring new English books for each grade all the way up through 8th grade with the approved list of words in it. So instead of teaching kids to catch their own linguistic fish, so to speak, and having them fully competent to read at about the 3rd grade, we're keeping them down as long as possible to maximize textbook sales. That's just one example of how bad education has become in this country. The main emphasis these days is on building up the child's self-esteem, to the detriment of any kind of knowledge or skills that may be useful later in life. What you get is a lot of supremely arrogant teenagers and young adults, full of pride in their person and their ethnic background, who can't read, can't add and can't hold down a job because it's beneath their ill-founded pride for them to work for a living. It's impossible for teachers to get away from this bizarre thinking. First, it's mandated by the Department of Education or the school board or someplace, so to stand up and refuse to teach using their guidelines is professional suicide. Secondly, I'm not sure how many teachers recognize claptrap any more when they see it. To teach in this country, you pretty much have to have a degree in education from an education college, from whence all reason fled a long time ago. Just for kicks, web over to the Education section of Yahoo! and look at the curriculum at any four-year school of education. I defy you to translate it into English, much less make any sense of it. Tip O'Neil used to say that "all politics are local." I don't know about that, but I know that all schools should be. What my kids are taught in school is between me, my kids and their teacher. Anyone else is excess baggage. Another Mom-and-apple-pie agency where Mom turns out to be Mrs. Bates. During the 1996 campaign, Libertarian candidate Harry Browne made an appearance on Comedy Central's Politically Incorrect. The topic turned to the Food and Drug Administration, and Browne said something to the effect that the FDA has killed more people than any tainted meat or bad drugs every had. The host, Bill Maher, and the audience howled. "But who would protect us if the FDA is abolished?," Maher whined. The question should have been, "Who will protect us from the FDA?" Consider the following:
When it comes to the FDA . . . just say no. The EPA, the NPS (in fact, the whole Department of Interior) and the related agencies march in lockstep with the most radical elements of the environmental movement -- a bunch of doomsayers who seem to take perverse delight in outdoing each other in predicting the end of the world. Never mind that most of the tenets of their self-flagellating religion -- global warming, landfill management, the ozone layer, the greenhouse effect, etc.-- have been completely discredited. I heard Carole Browner, the administrator of the EPA, on NPR a while back, campaigning for some new regulations to "further reduce" particulate emissions. Her justification was that "childhood asthma is on the rise," and therefore we must force industry (and eventually us) to spend $20 billion to meet the new requirements. When a representative of industry called in to question such a vast expenditure, Browner addressed him patronizingly. "I think the health of our children is more important than your profits, don't you?" What a textbook example of the tyranny of the EPA. It has all the classic signs of EPAitis:
I'll admit that this issue as it relates to the Libertarian philosophy is the most problematic for me. EPA, despite its tyranny, expense and socialist ways, has forced us at gunpoint into having cleaner air and water. But think about it -- the air and water have always been the responsibility of the Government, and for decades they allowed companies to screw them up to such an extent that public outcry finally forced the formation of the EPA and the passage of the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts in 1970. The problem wasn't inherently evil industry -- it was inherently stupid government. The EPA needs to be curtailed and its domain limited to enforcement of reasonable and cost-effective standards. And for God's sake, get rid of the Superfund -- let the people who made the mess clean it up, instead of sticking us with the bill. The greenies are also firmly in the saddle at NPS. Over the last twenty years or so, NPS has systematically destroyed our national parks in the guise of saving them.
The overarching philosophy of these assholes is that people aren't part of nature, and should be suppressed whenever possible. Sound nuts? Listen to David Graber, a senior biologist with the NPS:
And don't forget the completely useless Prince Philip, the titular head of the World Wildlife Fund, who once said, "If I were to be reincarnated, I would wish to return as a killer virus to lower human population levels." (Never mind the jokes about the British monarchy already being a virus -- it's too easy.) Our national parks are meant to be preserved, not used as some sort of playground for crackpot theories and prejudices. The parks need to be apolitical and efficient -- two things they will never be as long as the government is involved. I visited the Baltimore Zoo recently, a private zoo funded by corporate sponsors and user fees, and it was an Eden compared to the crappy National Zoo in Washington, run, of course, by the feds. There's a metaphor there somewhere. We have the world's greatest national defense, bar none. Unfortunately, the bulk of it isn't defending us. About 65% of the $300 billion we spend each year for DOD is for the defense of other countries, mostly Western Europe and Japan. We have hundreds of thousands of soldiers, sailors and airmen in every corner of the globe, doing other countries' dirty work for them. Are libertarians the only ones who see the irony of having the US pay for the defense of the world's richest nations? A few questions:
Elbridge Gerry, when arguing against the need for a standing army, told the Continental Congress (in, I'll admit, a possibly apocryphal quote), "A standing army is like an erect member. While it may provide excellent assurance of domestic tranquility, it invites foreign entanglements." Boy, was he right. We built up this mother of all erect members in the 1940s, and have spent 50 years trying to find new places to stick it into. Since we haven't had any wars since then, we have transmogrified the military into "the world's policeman," and have ended up in bizarre "police actions" in Korea, Vietnam, Panama, Iraq, Haiti, Somalia, Bosnia, etc., etc., etc., where our purpose was not to defeat an enemy (ours or somebody else's) but to "project our power" and force other nations to stop doing stuff we didn't like. Ignoring for the moment the moral arguments against this notion, our success rate is abysmal. Korea is still divided, the Vietnamese and Cambodians have slaughtered millions of their own people once we left, and Panama, Haiti, Somalia and Bosnia are still armpits run by madmen. Even our "success" in Iraq is suspect -- if our beef was with Saddam, why is he still in power? What did we accomplish by killing 100,000 of his poor, starving subjects while leaving him and his wives in luxury? This is a victory? It's fine to talk about noble intent. But what about all the other places in the world where innocent, peaceful people are being beaten, tortured, subjugated and killed by brutal thugs on the throne? What makes Somalia, of all places, worthy of our attention, while the leaders of (fill in the dictatorial African or Asian country) are left alone to wreak evil? We've got to stop this shit. I know it's hard to look the other way sometimes, but the affairs and conflicts of other countries are no concern of ours. We need to bring the troops home, get out of NATO, get out of the UN, dump all our treaties, and shrink the military down so we can defend ourselves and ourselves alone. Switzerland has the best army in Europe -- and because they refuse to get involved in other people's affairs, they've never had to use it. Switzerland has the right idea. Not one more foreign entanglement. Not one more American boy or girl dead in the cause of Yale boys proving who has the bigger dick. I'm sorry. Call me dense, but I just don't see the difference among alcohol, marijuana, cocaine, heroin, cigarettes, caffeine, and Dove bars, except that the government has arbitrarily decided that some are legal and some aren't. I can drink Sam Adams until I pass out in front of the TV, but I can't take a puff on a joint without my county-indoctrinated kids calling the cops on me. I can kill myself with Rum Twist cigars, but I can't take a harmless dose of laudanum, like Grandma used to, to calm my nerves. There are so many stupid assumptions associated with our drug laws and their draconian enforcement that I despair of where to begin. But I'll give it a shot:
Misuse of any kind of drug is wrong, as is the use of any of these substances by children. But as the old saying goes, you can't legislate morality. The drug laws, like the prostitution laws, the gambling laws, the zoning laws, and the like, are government trying to be your mom -- but she's got PMS, and she's packin' heat. All the drug laws have accomplished is to fill the prisons with non-violent criminals (leaving no room for the real bad guys), waste over $60 billion a year, tie up law enforcement officials, confiscate personal property on the basis of rumors, kill innocent bystanders and daily violate the Bill of Rights by making me pee in a bottle. If I want to do something that causes no harm to anyone else, so what? If I smoke a joint, snort coke, bet on a football game, or perform a particularly elaborate sex act with a hooker and a jar of mayonnaise, what's it to you? Why do you care? Close your blinds, put down the binoculars and leave me the hell alone. My first full-time job with the federal government was in 1978, when I was hired by the Social Security Administration to be a claims representative (CR), the guy you talk to when you apply for benefits. The Claims Manual was so big and complicated -- it took up thirteen loose-leaf binders at the time -- that newly-hired CRs need to attend a three-month training course to even start to understand the intricacies of the system. On the first day of class, the instructor gave us the most succinct 10-minute explanation of the Social Security system I've ever heard, and it was an eye-opener. First, he said, contrary to popular belief, Social Security is not a pension. It was established in 1936, at a time when 25% of the population was out of work, few companies offered pensions, and the average life expectancy for males was 65. It was a stop-gap, emergency measure to keep people from starving to death, and was not intended to replace savings or pensions -- or last forever, for that matter. Secondly, he quickly disabused us of the notion that SS paid for itself. Since 1939, he told us, SS has been operating as a classic Ponzi scheme, taking the monthly proceeds (our FICA taxes) and immediately shipping them out the door to current retirees. There is no account somewhere in the bowels of the SSA with your name on it, no interest accrues to your money, and the "Social Security trust fund" we always hear about is nothing but a fraud -- literally. If I tried to run a system like this, I'd be playing tennis at Allenwood before you could say "pyramid scheme." Finally, he pointed out that while people are always bitching about not "getting back what they put into the system," the fact is that the average retiree gets back his investment in about 3 years. After that, you're on the dole, just like welfare queens and food stamp recipients. Well, I didn't last too long at SSA -- being forced to deny medical benefits to a horribly-burned 16-year-old girl because of an administrative technicality pretty much did me in -- but I have watched and listened in disbelief over the last 18 years as politician after politician has pledged undying support for this massive fraud. The Social Security tax is now up to a horrendous 15% (half from you, half from your employer), and will only go up as the baby-boomers start to retire and draw their benefits. Right now, the whole system is an unfunded multi-trillion dollar IOU, a debt that is never discussed in budget negotiations because it is "off the table," too politically volatile to even bring up in polite company. Social Security is like a baby elephant in the upstairs bedroom -- when he gets big enough, he won't be upstairs anymore. The only way out of this incredible madness is to end it. Back in '78, even as a naive 22-year-old who couldn't balance a checkbook, I came to the conclusion that taking all that money and investing it in real annuity accounts would at least get the time value of money working for us, and put a huge chunk on money into the banking system, driving down loan rates and setting the economic Waring blender to puree, as P. J. O'Rourke puts it. Buying private annuities for everyone over 50 is going to cost about $8 trillion, money that we can only come up with by selling off a lot of federal assets -- all the land the feds own out west for no good reason, the Smithsonian, the Tennessee Valley Authority, the Washington Monument, the national parks, the whole shebang. It sounds horrifying, but note that Mount Vernon, Monticello, most museums, most zoos, a number of wildlife and bird preserves and a bunch of other cool stuff is owned by non-profit groups rather than the government, and they seem to work fairly well -- better, in fact, than their government counterparts. It takes a lot of courage, I'll admit, for a politician to stand up to the terrorist tactics of the AARP and the ignorance of most retirees and speak the truth about the system. But to simply ignore the problem or claim that Social Security can be "fixed" again and again is moral cowardice of staggering proportions. The next time you hear anybody talk about "fixing the system", sew up your pockets and vote the bastard out. And the number one deckchair is . . . Before 1960, federal welfare didn't exist in this country. Let's say you were a complete idiot -- or a Harvard-educated public administrator -- back then, and you decided for some perverse reason to create as many poor, downtrodden, helpless and dependent citizens as possible. How would you go about it?
Hey, guess what -- that's exactly what we did!
"If ye love wealth greater than liberty, the tranquility of servitude greater than the animating contest for freedom, go home from us in peace. We seek not your counsel, nor your arms. Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you. May your chains set lightly upon you; and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen." -- Samuel Adams
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10. The Federal Aviation Administration