The song remains the same.
All eyes are on Trump and team, and that’s the problem. The government is the star around which everything else orbits. In the U.S., as in the rest of the world, government is the dominant fixture in the lives of those who must live under it. Trump promises to Make America Great Again. Effective as that slogan has been, that’s all it is, an advertising bromide. Nations and other collectives are never great; once in a great while individuals are. The only role governments have in the quest for greatness is to stay out of the way of the individuals capable of achieving it.
Very little in Trump’s domestic program betrays any realization that government is the problem, not the solution. Some of the measures being bandied about scream: Be careful what you wish for! One proposal is to move 50,000 federal officials from the Civil Service to Schedule F, where they would essentially be political appointees serving at the sufferance of the president. For its proponents, the proposal will be a great idea right up until the next Democrat president is elected.
Another proposal is to move agencies away from Washington, supposedly to make them more responsive to the people for whom they nominally work. As an example, it’s been suggested that the Department of Energy—which ought to be abolished—should be moved to Los Alamos, New Mexico. The proponents of that one have obviously never been to tiny Los Alamos. (I grew up there.) Its overpaid (Los Alamos is one of the ten wealthiest areas in the U.S.), underachieving (what do they do with $5 billion a year?) scientists have driven up housing prices to Washington levels and have made Los Alamos the most liberal county in liberal New Mexico. Who would have thought that a town that owes its existence to the government consistently votes for more government?
thanks for posting these two articles -- “Trump vs. Reality”
I like to consider the reality of things, rather than be taken in by the hype.
Fire them. One year’s pay as severance. Privatize. The cream that was fired will quickly establish themselves as the entrepreneur ready to fill the vacuum. Nothing can be worse than the current dead weight of civil service.