June 05, 2012
Conservatives have long waged a seemingly futile campaign to slim down the federal government. Even “conservative” presidents such as George W. Bush fed the monster. But do not despair. Uncle Sam can be put on a diet. You can”t eliminate bloated government, but you can at least mitigate its impact.
A solution occurred to me while watching Fox News, which recently exposed the wild taxpayer-funded Las Vegas party for the General Services Administration (GSA), including how employees trolled the Net for pornography.
I”d bet that the cost of the booze, hotel rooms, expensive meals, and even clowns is chump change compared to the damage these folks do once behind their Washington desks. Subsidizing their gluttony outside the office could trim much of the fat they create while inside the office. Permitting such trifles would far outshine letting the DC desk jockeys meddle in our lives. If we could anesthetize the paper-pushers, life would improve.
Everything should be done to encourage life-shortening excesses with taxpayer money: dangerous sex, fatty foods, risky extreme sports, drugs, and Havana cigars. What a wonderful and humane way to cull out top bureaucrats”far cheaper than the usual buyouts. And they die happy.
Regularly scheduled fact-finding junkets, especially to overseas Sodoms and Gomorrahs, might shorten life expectancies and painlessly save the government millions in foregone pensions.
We can organize government-worker vacations to overseas danger zones. How about a luxury cruise up Africa’s east coast for 2,000+ government diversity experts? With a little baksheesh, Somali pirates would capture the cruise ship and hold it for a king’s ransom. We would rightly refuse to pay it or even negotiate despite pirate pleas to take the hostages back. (Imagine these battle-hardened pirates having to deal with hordes of garrulous, muddle-brained Diversity Stalinists for weeks on end.)
Meanwhile, armies of Health and Human Services apparatchiki would tour Botswana to understand how it takes an entire village to raise a child. If they unfortunately became sick, they would be treated by local doctors specializing in magic potions.
No private-sector Americans will be put at risk, let alone harmed when thousands of bureaucrats partied in Bangkok or trekked to Victoria Falls. A “social justice”-obsessed Department of Education bureaucrat can hardly screw up our schools if he is exploring the Brazilian rain forest’s ecosystem.
