Grover Norquist wants to drown the federal government in his bathtub.
It's a good laugh line, but consider the idea: No federal government.
Back to States Rights and maybe not even that.
As I was reading about the Civil War, after seeing the movie, Lincoln, something leaped out at me: Until the Civil War there was no federal paper currency. Private commercial banks issued bank notes, and profited handsomely from this, but as the Civil War revved up, the economy needed a more universal, accessible medium of exchange, so the federal government issued "greenbacks."
Can you imagine how the US economy of the 19th and 20th centuries could possibly have grown as it did had our currency remained "privatized?"
So the federal government provided this very basic part of our economy's "infrastructure."
This is likely true of other parts of American life--what the federal government has done is simply so big, you cannot see it, unless you think hard, or walk up high above to look down.
There's a scene in one of the Indiana Jones movies, where Indiana and his father are looking for a cross, which marks the spot, but the cross encompasses the entire floor they are standing on and they cannot see it until the father climbs up to a balcony and looks down, and then the cross is very apparent--so big you miss it.
What the federal government does for us is likely the same. So big you miss it.
Like the simple expedient of money, federal currency.
I am not enough of an economist or sociologist or anthropologist to bring to mind other essential things for which we need the federal government.
The Republicans want to privatize Medicare and Social Security, which of course would be a way of destroying these programs, but you can at least imagine a world without them
But what about no Coast Guard? I suppose that could be privatized.
No army,navy, marines? Well, to some extent these have been privatized already.
No FAA? No air traffic controllers? Privatize it. Might work.
What about an FDA? Milton Friedman said we didn't need a Food and Drug Administration to keep unsafe drugs off the market--the threat of lawsuit would do that, he said. Which just goes to show was an ignoramus Milton Friedman, the dean of the famous Chicago school of economics, was. The Nobel prize winning economist could say something so stupid because, well, he was Nobel prize winning Milton Friedman. But, of course, he missed the basic point that the whole idea of the FDA is to prevent bad things from happening, not simply to impose a cost to them. It would be less than complete comfort to the child born with stubs for arms and legs, after his mother took thalidomide during his gestation, that his mother recovered a settlement from the class action law suit.
What about the Center for Disease Control, the National Institutes of Health, which provide for the public health, prevent and manage epidemic diseases, uncover basic scientific advances to treat cancer, diabetes, infectious diseases and all sorts of afflictions of humankind? Would privatizing all these work better, more efficiently when the basic motive is profit?
What about the National Oceanographic and Aeronautical Administration, which monitors fish populations--over fishing driven by the profit motive--and the air? Where is the profit in clean air?
What about the National Geographic Survey, which measures the melting of polar ice caps? Where is the profit there?
And what about federal laws like Glass-Stiegel, which prevented banks from becoming too big to fail, which insisted on a separation of banks which keep the savings of citizens separate from the bank schemers who would risk everything on mortgage backed securities?
I need your help, gentle reader, to bring to mind those things government, motivated by the commonweal, the common good, does things better than private industry motivated by the profit motive.
I suppose this is the basic argument between those who believe in a government which does what cannot be done by non government vs the Ayn Rand crowd, the Paul Ryans and Grover Norquists who believe government, especially federal government, is good for nothing.
These Norquists and Ryans are the political equivalent of the off the grid people, who want no part of the electrical grid, the water and sewer systems, the armed defense of the nation because they realize to take any of this basic infrastructure, to avail themselves of any of these basic services, means they would have to become indebted to the government which provides them, i.e., they'd have to pay, Heaven forbid, taxes.
So they take to the hills, the woods, the mountains, to create an island to themselves, with the guns and bullets made in the factories, supplied with water, electricity, means of transportation and communication to get those guns to market, provided by the federal, state and local governments where those factories produce their guns.
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