Yet another reason to cut the size of government: you’ll cut the size of people who work for government, and reduce the number of opportunities for people doing government work to use it as a bridge to crony enrichment.
Or I guess you could just pay public sector employees twice as much in wage and compensation as private sector employees make on average, and thereby take away the temptation.
Either way.
Right. People engage in theft, graft, and embezzlement because they’re not paid enough.
They’re all Jean Valjean, down to the last flunkie.
Absolutely, di. Government has 99 Valjeans to each Thénardier.
Values: Fuck Yeah! There’s a progressive political concept to shrink government!
I would call this the best reason to cut the size of government – and the reason most sellable to everyone from the Tea Party to the #OWS crowd, as it speaks in language that anyone can understand and identify with: Power Corrupts. Without regard to who wields it – it’s true of Government every bit as much as it is of EEEVUL! Corporations, Democrats and Republicans alike.
The Obama Administration proves to be a living example of this every day, even to its supporters, who are with each passing day less loath to admit it.
There’s a maxim in the Information Security world (where I work) that says that one of the best ways to protect your computer resources from attacks is to reduce, to the greatest extent possible, the “attack surface” – that is, the exposure of your resources to the outside world. I think this applies nicely here too. Every extra function of government, every intrusive new law, every onerous regulation – all serve to expand the “attack surface” of Government, opening new avenues for
hackerslobbyists to exploit.If there’s any classical liberal think tank out there with an ad budget (Cato? AFP? Anyone Paul Ryan associates with?), they’d do well to get some major ad buys out there with this message. The perfect thing would be to have it start out as an attack on the Right – hell, get Leftie bugaboo Abramoff himself to star in them, telling the world how he (like any lobbyist) does his part for government corruption – then the table-turning A-Ha! moment.
No, not the ’80s Norwegian pop band.