Make Government Small Again

The main difference between the public and private sector is the assumption of responsibility. Imagine that, after watching a lively YouTube tutorial, you decide to go and do your first prostate operation with no prior knowledge. In the public sector, the patient undergoing your prostate operation is just another unhappy individual, just another number.

In contrast, in the private sector, the prostate you will be operating on is your own. Something tells me that you will operate more responsibly in the private sector. In fact, something tells me that you will admit that you are not sufficiently prepared to poke around with a scalpel in such a delicate area and you will end up giving up.

I have had an aversion to bureaucracy ever since I was a child. Now that everyone is looking for a reason to be a victim, I can say it: I suffer from bureaucracy-phobia. I see an official form with a government stamp on it and my hair stands on end like George Soros’ bank account, a hellish and destructive burning rises up from my feet to my head, and I feel like immolating myself inside some federal registry. Without reaching the pathological European madness, the United States has a huge bureaucracy problem. Thousands of operations that in real life would only take 15 minutes, are prolonged for days and days in the public administration, in the government. (READ MORE from Itxu Diaz: Ten Priorities for Trump’s New Administration)

Companies have to dedicate themselves to making money. Citizens have to dedicate themselves to their work and their families. The government has to stop bothering us. We don’t even ask for help (when the government helps you, it charges you at a premium first, and then, if it goes wrong, it’s nobody’s fault or, even worse, it’s yours).

The government is supposed to invent subsidies to solve problems, anyone who hears this will think it is a nice story. However, is anyone checking to see if, besides sounding nice, it is actually solving the problem? Moreover, if it is solving the problem, is anyone looking to see if it is not collaterally causing ten new problems?

Subsidies don’t work, they disincentivize, they scare money away, they scare investors, and they make idiots out of most of the subsidized. Part of the government’s job is to right wrongs, and sometimes a subsidy is necessary to do that, I admit, but it should be the damn exception, and be as closed, ring-fenced, and policed as our money is by the IRS.

After the reduction of bureaucracy and the elimination of subsidies, the third essential part of putting the government on a diet is the reduction of taxes. Subsidies and taxes are two sides to the same obesity.

The fourth part is the reduction of public spending. If you want to lower taxes, you have to cut government spending, otherwise, the economy could go into cardiac arrest and the result would be a disaster, because 15 Democrat economists emerge the following day screaming like crazy, “See, I told you. Lower taxes don’t work.” Krugman would come out two weeks later saying the same thing as if it were news.

And the fifth part of an emergency action plan against government obesity is the simplification of laws. Nothing makes the citizen feel more harassed than the proliferation of stupid laws. Freedom is important. But the feeling of freedom is sometimes even more important. Get rid of all those junk laws, all the ideological muck, all that boring legal verbiage, and let individuals make their own choices again.

Trump and Musk now plan to reissue Reagan’s Grace Commission, but intend on getting it right this time; that is, that in addition to detecting waste, someone will then try to eliminate it. Actually, I think this tandem will have a much easier time than Reagan did. First, because the government has grown considerably fatter, which means that it is full of excess fat. And second because of a circumstantial issue: in a few months, Trump will have access to the Government and will be able to check with his own eyes all that is left over, cut it up, and pile it in a corner. Musk, for his part, has a company that sends things into space. You can come to your own conclusions there! (READ MORE: The Mutation of Stupidity)

Let’s start a prayer chain for Trump to use his sharpest scissors and for Musk to send all the leftover government fat into space. But not to near space where his satellites operate. No. Far beyond, to the end of the universe, to where Cleopatra lost the snake, to a place where Democrats can’t get to in a few years and bring all the crap back.

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