Smaller, leaner government costs us less. That’s why citizens on both sides of the political spectrum like it, although some more than others. But still others like it because it additionally allows them to evade the police power of the state and its regulation of things like unfair labor practices of employers or imaginative combinations of stock derivatives. So I thought about it and asked myself why small government advocates do not lead the drive for a smaller military, which gets the single biggest annual outlay of discretionary federal money.
Just think. Instead of this year’s $895 billion for Pentagon purposes, we could reroute a third of that to education or curing cancer or highway and bridge infrastructure — or just keep it. That is the amount that the retired generals and admirals of the Center for Defense Information in Washington say we could channel away from arms each year without harming our strong defense. Who would question either the savvy or the patriotism of retired brass? They better than most know that the defense budget is perennially puffed up by congresspersons who add pork for their districts in the form of weapons systems the brass say are unnecessary or outmoded.
Less money for defense. To say it means sudden death for any candidate of either party. We are so habituated to concluding that more money for arms means automatically stronger defense that we never hear any office-seeker pushing for slimming back the cabinet department of government that gets fully 63 percent of the discretionary budget. That figure in itself ought to arouse the smaller-government seekers. But add to it the fact that the U.S. spends more on defense than do all other nations of the world combined, including our enemies, our friends and everyone else. Note as well that all our hugely expensive hardware was useless against a couple box cutters.
But the reply of the Big Military spenders is that we are proudly willing to beggar our national economy so that, on our own, unencumbered by bothersome, time-consuming discussion, we can decide things like invading Iraq rather than having to convince the rest of the U.N. Security Council. Don’t consider the objections of even allies, like France, whom we vilify because they were unmoved by unsubstantiated claims of weapons of mass destruction, or unverified charges of a Saddam-Osama link. We had known for 10 years before 9/11 that they despised each other.
This is old material. We are tired of it. Yet President Obama cannot seem to end what never should have begun, at the cost of 5,000-plus U.S. service personnel. This is what I consider Big Government run wild. If we brought home our troops from Iraq, it would save American and Iraqi lives and fortunes with a truly constructive shrinking of government. What is keeping us?
And finally, while we are slashing costly and intrusive government and its great expense, how about if we dispatch those meddlesome monitors charged with watching poor Wall Street. Think how much we’ll save when we no longer have to pay government officials to supervise small banks that bump from their books bad loans so larger holding companies can bundle them with more mortgage-backed securities to be speculated upon by bidders at home and abroad using hedge funds to hedge on the prospect that such bundles might just be infected.
I am no psychologist, but I think I see greatly successful appeals made by Small Government folks who play upon our adolescent desires to be free of rules. They get ordinary folks to protest against sensible controls like the Glass-Steagall act, and then we all suffer. Let’s stop pretending that we are back in the 19th century in Stetson hats and prairie bonnets. Then let’s cut the parts of excessive government put in place to benefit the few.
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