Libertarians and The Phantom

Having run what amounted to a small business ( a solo medical practice)  for years, I got a taste of the cold fear with which a mom and pop enterprise can regard the government. I had a  one employee and I needed to pay an accountant to do my taxes and I had to hire a sort of book keeper to help me bill Medicare without straying into the dreaded territory of "fraud and abuse," which was easy to do, even if you were trying not to. 

For example, I had to send out bills for $4.95 after Medicare and Blue Cross had paid, because if I simply wrote off that amount, I was committing fraud and abuse. The rationale was if I was willing to accept less, willing to forgo that $4.95 per patient, then my real fee was $4.95 less than I had originally billed Medicare. Stuff like that.

I could never keep up with all the new rules and regulations.

And I was always vulnerable. 

One year I got a post card telling me I had failed to file for my license to practice medicine in the state of Maryland. The license was renewed every two years and that was just enough to mean I could forget if I had renewed this year or last, but I always got that big brown envelop when the time came due. Until one year, when Maryland decided it was cheaper to make every one renew on line. Trouble was, they didn't bother to tell everyone about it.

So I wrote letters of protest to my local state legislators and the man who ran the Board of Medicine license renewal wrote me a letter telling me how hard everyone in his office worked and it was all my own fault. 

I got my license, but a month later, I got notified I was being audited to be sure I had actually got enough continuing medical education credits to maintain my license. It was a "random audit," which just happened to occur after I had created a stink for the Board of Medicine license renewal guy. A random audit, after two decades of never being audited.

It was a message from City Hall to let me know I could be sunk with a single wave of their hand, unable to practice medicine in the state if they decided to get nasty.

It was just one more reason to leave Maryland, a page right out of The Wire.  Baltimore slime in its purest form.

So I understand antipathy toward government from the perspective of the little guy, I really do.

On the other hand, when I hear these Tea Party characters carrying on about how they are going to reduce the deficit which our grandchildren will be paying for by cutting wasteful government spending, I always want to ask: but Senator elect, exactly which programs will you cut? 

And they always come up with cutting the entire Department of Education, which would make hardly a dent in the deficit or the national debt. 

Ronald Reagan, Jim DeMint, all the Tea Partiers,  want to believe there's waste out there. Undeserving Welfare Queens living high on the hog, on the backs of hard working, deserving people like you and me. Waste, fraud and abuse. Just waiting to be cut. Cut the pay of federal employees by 10%, all those overpaid government workers; sock it to them. Make them pay for their extravagant lifestyles the way we would never dream of making the Wall Street broker/banker pay. We'll balance the budget with all the savings, melt down the deficit by reduction in work force slips to government workers.

Ronald Reagan cut lots of federal government jobs and he tripled the deficit  and unbalanced our budget big time--I think those numbers are right, but being right about numbers never has seemed to matter in this discussion. 

Nobody really cares about the numbers in this numbers game. Rand Paul says by simply cutting spending, you can make everything all right. Keep those tax cuts in place for the billionaires--deficit hawks strangely never seem to see the income side of the ledger, only the outgo. The income to the government is always a moral outrage to the Rand Pauls and Jim DeMints of the world.  But nothing outrages them more than the outgo side. We should simply not spend, and then we would not need an income. Try that with the family budget.

For Rand Paul and all those who travel with him, it's not really about the money or the numbers. It's about belief which is really not founded in hard data, just bedrock faith in the idea we must be getting cheated by the government, because if the government is bad, well then, we're on our way to solving our problem.