If we were to rely upon the press itself to tell us what the results of the government shutdown were, we’d have to conclude that it saves lives. For we’re being told by varied newspapers that three people have died in the understaffed national parks. Given that the average is six deaths in any one week, that would mean that 15 lives have been saved this past three weeks by there being no nonessential federal workers in those parks.
That, of course, is to be facile. But other than the toilets backing up in those same parks, we do seem to be remarkably short of bad outcomes from this process. Sure, there are a lot of people complaining they’re not getting their paychecks, but us not having to pay bureaucrats is a saving to us taxpayers, not a cost.
If shutting 25 percent of the federal government saves lives and blocks u-bends then, well, do we really need all that government we generally get? It’s certainly possible to argue that we don’t. Not all and every little last piece of it, at least.
However, this is where we face something of a problem. For just about everyone who has ever stood for election has told us that they’re going to spend our money more carefully. That they’re going to cut government waste and make it all more efficient. Something that never does seem to happen. The unhappy truth being that it’s not possible to salami slice a bureaucracy, that’s just not the way that they work. C. Northcote Parkinson taught us that the only real activity of, the aim and purpose of, any bureaucracy is to survive and gain an ever larger budget on which to do so.
We can’t curb nor cut bureaucracy; all we can do is entirely kill it. Sadly, we really do need government to do some things, so we’re always going to end up employing some of those Beltway folks to do something. Thus our only viable path is obvious — we must have government do less, attempt fewer tasks. Then we can kill those bureaucracies that formerly pretended to attend to them.
We can’t shave bureaucratic budgets nor headcounts. But losing 25 percent of the government’s funding does seem to have revealed that the world still turns while we enjoy less government itself. Even, for those 15 people, we thrive with less bureaucratic oversight. Our task, thus, is to look at what government currently does and work out which things it should stop doing.
My list is going to be considerably more inclusive here than might be politically viable — I’d close the entirety of the departments of agriculture, education, and commerce in any and every government anywhere straight away, and then after breakfast start thinking about what else we can get along without. Your list might be very much more specific. But it is claimed that there are 650 different regulatory agencies at the federal level alone — actually, within the medical professions alone there are 650 state licensing boards, which does look like a tad bit of overkill. We can most assuredly do without one or more of these.
It’s an important point, though. If we do want to have less government, the absence of disaster while we currently have 25 percent less of it being instructive about whether we need quite so much as we have, then we need to have government doing fewer things. The task is thus to identify what need not be done in this, as former President Barack Obama said, way we do things together.
Quite obviously, the way to do this is not to open the Office Of Bureaucracy Reduction, that way madness lies.
Tim Worstall (@worstall) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is a senior fellow at the Adam Smith Institute. You can read all his pieces at The Continental Telegraph.
