August 12, 2010
Can you believe Ronald Reagan said, “Government isn”t the solution. Government is the problem?” A politician spouting Milton Friedmanisms today is about as unlikely as another black president. It wasn”t an unusual quote for Reagan, however. He worshipped Friedman and also famously quipped, “To say Congress spends like drunken sailors is to insult drunken sailors.” (To which Rep. Tom Feeney added, “and at least drunken sailors are spending their own money!”) Thatcher was the same way. After Milton died, she said “I shall greatly miss my old friend’s lucid wisdom and mordant humor.”
Most modern politicians are blissfully ignorant of their thorn-like existence in our side. The Messiah and his followers see no problem with numbers like $787,000,000,000 for the stimulus and $940,000,000,000 for the health care bill. When people protest these unprecedented numbers, the president responds, with unflinching audacity, “You’d think they would be sayin’ thank you.”
This smug gluttony has made politicians morbidly obese. Nonetheless, outside of the feeding frenzy there are at least two who refuse to indulge themselves. NJ Governor Chris Christie and WI Congressman Paul Ryan are politicians who hate politicians as much as we do. Like gays, both civil servants go completely against what they were designed for and try to make themselves extinct. They are a flesh-eating disease in a bloated government and the body politic needs them now more than ever before.
Chris Christie has been vetoing taxes and fighting unions since he was elected in 2009. Most recently, he decided teachers, a group with the most powerful union in the world, need to start putting some food back in the trough. Teachers in his state are some of the country’s best paid, earning an average of about $43 an hour. Yes, they only make 55k a year but that’s because they only come in for 9 months and they leave at 3:30 every day (and don”t give me that crap about prep work—you can”t do lesson plans while waterskiing). Christie’s teachers are aghast they are being asked to pay back a whopping $750 of the $10,000 he gives them in free healthcare. His hubris earned him the nickname “Wrecking Ball” and pundits like Glenn Beck are so excited by the governor they refer to his teacher fights as “Christie Porn.” Yet, all he’s asking for is 7.5% back. The fact that this tiny portion of their winnings is causing such a fuss is a good indication of how far we’ve gone down the big government rabbit hole. Today’s politicians live in perpetual fear of union reprisal and with good reason. When a body builder/action hero who calls himself “The Governator” suggested, maybe, civil servants might take a bit of a pay cut, they ran over to his house and terrorized his family until he changed his mind. Then the state went bankrupt.
Paul Ryan saw what happened in California and compared it to Europe where, as he puts it, “welfare states are collapsing under the weight of their own debt.” Ryan is one of those rare breeds who sees money pour into his profession and says, “Whoa, whoa, that’s way too much. You don”t have that kind of money. Slow down.” Can we take a brief moment to recognize how rare that kind of thinking is in today’s “politics as usual”? He’s taking the God-like power we imparted him and using it to thwart childlike behavior. Ryan and Christie are priests standing at the pulpit and convincing their parish God is not great. They are murderers telling us where the bodies are and offering their wrists up to be handcuffed. They are Guy Fawkes with a key to the White House. Sorry, but it’s porn for me too.
Not only is Paul Ryan anti-Big Government, he even provided a much talked about “Roadmap for America’s Future” that provides, step-by-step, the best way to shrink government and avoid economic collapse. Much to the Democrat’s chagrin, the plan illustrates how unique the debt is this time around by pointing out we don”t simply owe it to ourselves or even our grandchildren. We owe it to countries like China who proudly identify themselves as our sworn enemies. For the first time ever, Paul Ryan says, our reliance on other countries is jeopardizing our political and economic sovereignty. He also says “shame on us.” I am going to get an operation to become gay and marry him. Then I’m going to marry Christie. Is gay polygamy legal yet?
The Obamaniacs hate Ryan’s roadmap because it means less Spanish vacations for Michelle. The Times is particularly annoyed by him and had Paul Krugman pound out a strange and wandering diatribe full of monocle vocabulary like the word “flimflam”—twice! He called Ryan a fraud, a charlatan, a dope, and insisted the roadmap ignores all the amazing tax revenue Obama’s going to get—from us, for us, or something. Ryan calmly called Krugman’s piece “inflammatory“ and said tax revenue had, in fact, been analyzed but it’s a drop in the ocean compared to this imminent “tidal wave of debt”. Krugman responded with silence and spent the better part of an hour looking in the mirror.
America’s first politicians knew power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. The constitution is a time capsule sent from them to us explaining how we must limit their power. Usually, their cynicism is justified and their peers do everything they can to amend or even repeal a previous amendment. But, just when we thought the Constitution was done for, guys like Christie and Ryan give us a wink and throw a wrench in the works. Let’s hope it sticks.
