Those tea-drinking deregulationists may be on to something. Life really has gotten more complex as I’ve gotten older. Today we have so many demands made on our freedoms and liberties and independence besides. Maybe it’s time to chop back some of the governmental kudzu that’s slowly overgrowing the countryside, slowing everything down, tripping us up with new rules and regs. We don’t need a nanny state whose growing number of employees has to be paid with our tax money.
So, first, let’s dump all that airport security bother and the intrusive searches. Why can’t we just walk onto a plane without all that fuss? Think of the convenience, let alone the newfound money currently paying security salaries. Those al-Qaida extremists know we mean business, so we can call off the dogs. They know we have not hesitated to lavish trillions on our military campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan and elsewhere in our world-renowned practice of spending two thirds of each year’s discretionary federal budget on arms, even if no other country – or all other countries together — come near us in such prodigal preference for military preparedness. We certainly would not think of cutting back on defense even though we know military contractors press for costly weapons programs that even the generals and admirals do not want. Who wants to appear soft on defense and lacking in virility? Contractors and congressmen know better than military brass what we need.
Second, why do we need all those expensive police, firefighters and emergency medical technicians? Hasn’t Camden and its celebrated cutbacks proved that we can get by without all that restraining of our civil liberties? Smaller government should start with eliminating what inhibits us most.
Next, the teachers have outlived their usefulness, so since they are on the public payroll, let’s follow Trenton’s egregious lead and dispose of them, too. Why, back in the old days twice as many children fit into a classroom, and those kids know more than do kids today. Of course I’m smarter than a fifth-grader. Aren’t you? Why in fact should we have a Department of Education at all since the Constitution nowhere states that the government must bear the expense of teaching children? Privatize it, the way the forward-looking congressional geniuses want to privatize Social Security, yet another expensive dose of socialism borne by taxpayers.
Tree-huggers have gulled us into thinking we need whole agencies on state and federal levels to protect the environment. All they do is block us from dumping chemicals into land, sea and air, the way God intended. Aren’t they the same people whose pestering has made it mandatory that construction vehicles have to make that annoying beep-beep sound when backing up? What’s that about? And must they be allowed to crimp new-house construction with paranoia about water tables?
How about those TV commercials we saw of a woman in a store pushing a shopping cart complaining – on our behalf, mind you — that the government has no business telling us what consumer products are safe? Imagine, some uppity health official thinks we don’t know what is good for our children. It’s like the other ads that have across the bottom of the screen that a major petroleum consortium sponsors the effort to have us write Washington to get our representatives to unleash a mighty push to drill us dry. Who wants to depend on those swarthy foreigners for our oil, even if most of our oil imports come from Canada? If we can’t trust the oil magnates, after their great effort to clean up after the Exxon Valdez, for which not a dime has yet been paid, to provide us with affordable gas, whom can we trust? Didn’t they distinguish themselves recently in the Gulf of Mexico?
And this whole Wall Street thing has been overdone. So if you don’t want the thrill of betting on a mortgage-backed security, stay home from the casino. Just because the middle echelon of major brokerage houses devised derivatives whose complexity escaped those houses’ directors, directors who are being fabulously paid as they should be in a capitalist society, why bellyache? They will spend their gains in a way that trickles down to us commoners, so we all will benefit eventually.
Finally, I’ve had it with those Wisconsin public employees. Where do they get off, claiming a right to collective bargaining? Fewer and fewer Americans belong to unions anyway, so why can’t Wisconsin agree to live with less, the way most people do?
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