The most important task in the wake of the pandemic was to strip down our bloated, overfunded, underperforming, downright dangerous government and return more money, capital, and manpower to the American people. Instead we're getting the opposite.
I wanted Trump to run for re-election on that platform, combined with - and flowing very naturally into - the Return to Normal. I think that would have been a successful campaign, and it could have become the cornerstone of a strong conservative bloc in Congress.
It's still what we need to do, and the conversation we need to have, so hopefully someone picks up the flag and rallies the troops going into the 2022 and 2024 elections. It's about to become a couple trillion dollars harder to restore American strength and freedom, though.
Mock the Left and its ugly "never let a crisis go to waste" motto all you want, but there is something to be said for using dramatic events to make a strong argument to voters. The pandemic debacle was a rather stunning demonstration of Big Government's incompetence.
Every awful story from the past decade or two comes down to Big Government being so fat, greedy, and institutionally stupid that it turns the most straightforward operations into fantastically expensive disasters. We desperately need to claw back money and power for the people.
Even Afghanistan began as a swift and stunning military success but ended as a corpulent bureaucratic boondoggle that gobbled up trillions of dollars, and spent so many American lives, with nothing to show for it except the Taliban parading around with American weapons.
Who looks at Afghanistan, and all the domestic and foreign disasters before and after, and thinks: "yeah, let's give this government another couple trillion dollars to blow and see what it can do!" What can D.C. point to as a success that would persuade us to "invest" more in it?
Go through all of the Big Government programs of the past half century - it would take a team of researchers thousands of man-hours to get them all - and you'll see nearly all of them are failures based on the success metrics laid out at the time of their inception.
Isn't that amazing? Decades gone by, trillions spent, and you'd have to work for months to find a single program of the centralized government that kept all of the promises it made and came in under budget. But now they demand trillions more to spend!
Of course, Big Gov programs are NEVER judged against the promises made when they are launched. The goalposts are ALWAYS moved. The metrics are always changed. Phantom disasters are conjured to convince us even the most ruinous programs were "better than doing nothing."
Why can't we play the hypothetical game the other way for a change? Let's imagine all that could be accomplished if we let the American people keep another trillion dollars of their own money, instead of taking a trillion away and pouring it into the black hole of Big Gov.
Let's talk about all the amazing things we could have done - all that we could have built, developed, invented, and enjoyed - over the past half century if we had kept our money and capital, instead of handing it over to our bloated, hateful, corrupt political class.
Is your imagination captured by things like privately funded spaceflight? Imagine that times a hundred, times a thousand. That's what we might have today, if we had never let Big Gov siphon our money and energy away with insane deficit spending, tax hikes, and regulations.
The worst thing about giving the Leviathan State more of our money is that you can bet a huge amount of it will be abused to grab even MORE of our money and freedom in the future. The first priority of Big Government is making government even bigger.
What we need is a vastly smaller, poorer, weaker government more focused on its DUTIES instead of indulging its agendas and enriching the political class. A leaner government whipped into fighting shape that focuses on its missions instead of daydreaming about mission creep.
A smaller government forced to make trade-offs instead of just assuming it can print money and raise taxes forever to indulge its appetite for power. A government filled with people worried about losing their jobs - JUST LIKE THE REST OF US.
Success should mean survival, rather than failure meaning growth. Right now every Big Government organ has incentives to fail upward - to claim that it needs more and more funding forever because the problem it addresses keeps getting worse.
We need smaller government where agencies know if they report no success at their core mission, they don't get bigger - they get eliminated, and we try something else, or give the people their money back and see what THEY can do. Lean and hungry, not bloated and ravenous.
There are things we need government to do - and we need smaller government wholly focused on them. Small enough to be comprehensible, so it can be held accountable. We should be empowering the people to rebuild our strength, not diminishing the people with even bigger government.
A funny thing happens when people have limited resources and must invest them carefully to succeed, because failure means ruin: they innovate. They make those tough choices and find ways to do what seemed impossible. They trim the fat and build their muscle. They stay focused.
That's life in the private sector, every single day - and it SHOULD be life in the government, too. Of course the bloated disaster in D.C. doesn't innovate and has no solutions except "give us more money." It feels no pressure to innovate and no requirement to succeed. /end
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