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According to official history, the 104th Congress doomed itself when it shut down the government to force its budget priorities on the president. People got up in arms and demanded that government be reopened. This taught the people and their representatives a valuable lesson. As much as we may complain, we truly need big government. Today, we all agree with the White House vow to never allow the government to shut down again.

Of course, everything about this story is nonsense. Shutting down the government was this Congress’s most noble act. Though the freshmen, who forced the closing against the leadership’s wishes, didn’t properly prepare for the inevitable response from the media and the bureaucracy, they were on the right track. It may have been the only principled act in two years of political compromise.

Moreover, nobody has produced a shred of evidence that the government shutdown was as unpopular as the media claimed it was. It was asserted daily, but never proven. Oh sure, we heard about how people couldn’t get passports, couldn’t get into Yellowstone, couldn’t see the Vermeer art exhibit at the National Gallery of Art. But what’s most startling is that the central government—which consumes 40 percent of the national wealth—wasn’t missed much at all.

There was a fiscal illusion at work. At issue was a budget authorization that entitled government to spend money before it was there to spend. But government could have reopened, and run based on present receipts. That way the budget would be immediately balanced. Everyone claims to want pay-as-you-go government, but nobody suggested this as an option. They acted as if debt finance is part of the natural law.

There is still more to learn about government during shutdowns. Consider what is known as the “Washington Monument Ploy.” When budget cuts are threatened, visiting hours at popular monuments are cut back. A budget cut is voted by Congress, or an insufficient increase, and moments later an official-looking official asks the assembled tourists to please disperse. Thanks to those greedy Congressmen, we’ve been denied essential funds.

The media are there to record every word, and conduct interviews to be broadcast on national television. Average people tell the reporter, “my family and I came all the way from Sacramento, but because of political bickering, our vacation has been ruined,” etc. The lesson is clear: Congress had better vote every dime the president demands or the People will strike back on prime time news. Sadly, this ploy works time and again.

Behind the scenes, the whole scenario has been orchestrated. There are very few things the federal government does that people directly benefit from. Among them are issuing passports, delivering the mail, running monuments and museums, and maintaining national parks. That’s precisely why they take the hardest hit.

Now, in running the Washington Monument Ploy, the White House has to be careful not to cause it to backfire. For example, if the mail stopped being delivered, the public might revolt against the Post Office itself, and fuel demands that it be privatized. The trick is to shut down services that affect a minority conspicuously, in ways the media can dramatize, but not generate anger against government itself.

What’s behind it all, of course, is the desire to keep the largess flowing, not to serve the public. If the feds wanted to serve the public, and Congress wasn’t authorizing new spending, they could divert money from services people don’t need (“Social Services for Refugees and Cuban/Haitian Entrants”) to those they do need (passports). Even better, a truly beneficent leader would simply give away control of monuments and passport offices to private entities to run for profit.

Here’s the irony. The services that people need most from government are the very ones that could easily be run privately. This follows by definition: if people want something, an entrepreneur is glad to make a profit providing it. On the other hand, the services people don’t need shouldn’t exist at all.

From a strategic standpoint, the government has the incentive to hold onto privatizable services like national parks because they are useful in times of government shutdown. It monopolizes some services just to keep the public from thinking they could get along without the government.

This is more than just a budget trick; it goes to the heart of nearly everything government does. Even at the local level, when budgets are cut, the first thing to get the axe are extended hours at the public library. Then the most popular periodicals themselves are canceled. Government, in its malice, gains more benefit from withholding useful services than providing them.

This is the very opposite of how private business operates. When a business has to cut costs, it looks for waste and inefficiencies, but it is loathe to cut consumer services. In fact, it might improve them if doing so is likely to bring in more revenue. Sticking it to the consumer would only create more losses and drive the company toward lower profitability.

With government sabotaging any attempt to cut its budget by cutting services people want, how can government budgets be successfully cut? There’s no easy answer—ideally the person doing the cutting would have massive power over the bureaucracy—but here’s the first step. All so-called essential government services should be privatized. That way government would no longer be seen as economically or socially essential.

Let’s start with the Washington Monument. There’s no excuse for not handing it over to a private company or association to run, just as Mount Vernon is run privately. Those who say it can’t be done haven’t noticed how many people visit that political temple every year.

But isn’t this monument a public good that people should have full access to? Granted. That’s why we need private enterprise, which always focuses on the public, to provide it. The same is true of the mails, national parks, passport offices, the Smithsonian, or any other good or service the government provides that people regard as necessary to their well being.

The advantage would be obvious. During the next government shut down—let’s hope it comes soon and stays long—the bureaucracy would have fewer means of demonstrating that we really need them. They will be reduced to showing how awful it is that the Indian and Native American Employment and Training Program has been shut down.

All of this presumes that government has no other means to fund itself during emergencies. Unfortunately, that is not true. During the 1995 shutdown, Treasury head Robert Rubin conspired with other government-financial elites to run the government on money looted from civil-service pension accounts, although this is illegal.

Then the bureaucracy gave Congress a sock in the chops by forwarding unearned back pay to the entire government workforce. The whole shutdown ended up as a paid vacation for the most despised class in the country. If anything about the shutdown inspired public anger, it was this above all. Sadly, the opposition party took the blame, and then let bygones be bygones.

The lesson of the government shutdown is not that people want it to stay open, always and forever, but that the world doesn’t fall apart when Uncle Sam takes the day off. Let’s give him the next century or so, see how the people on their own can restore prosperity and liberty. With no taxes to pay, there’d be plenty left over to pay even exorbitant admission fees to the Washington Monument.

From LRC, here.

In early 2035, the thirty-fourth year of the war against Al Qaeda,  the Pentagon issued a White Paper saying that the F35 Raptor, the front-line fighter plane of the United States, was nearing the end of its useful life and needed to be replaced. Not everyone agreed. Various budget-cutting organizations argued that the Raptor had never been used and thus no one could tell whether it had a useful life. Anyway, the job of the Air Force, killing third-world peasants and their families, had been co-opted by drones. America didn´t need a new fighter, said the critics.

The Air Force countered that the new plane would look feral and make loud, exciting noises. To this, critics could find no rejoinder. Design studies began.

An early question was what to call the new fighter. By tradition, aircraft were named after aggressive but unintelligent birds (F-15 Eagle, F16 Fighting Falcon), unpleasant animals (AH-1 Cobra, F-18 Hornet) ghosts (F-4 Phantom, AC-130 Spectre) or Stone Age nomads (AH-64 Apache). However, something with more pizzazz was needed to get funding through Congress.

Discussion ensued. Suggestions were solicited from The Building, as the Pentagon calls itself. These ran from “F-40 Screaming Kerblam” to the politically marginal “Horrendous Dyke,” whose author believed that it would depress enemy fliers. Going with zoological tradition, the Air Force wanted to call it the Rabid Bat. A congressional wag weary of military price tags  suggested “Priscilla,” because that no pilot would then go near it and the country would be spared the expense of wars.  (His idea of painting it in floral patterns was not taken seriously.)

A national transgender- advocacy  group favored “Susan B. Anthony,” but this was held to be disrespectful of Ebonics, and in any event Anthony might be Susan. It was hard to tell about these things.

The Air Force prevailed. The Rabid Bat was born.

Squabbling over specifications immediately began. Lockheed-Martin and Boeing Military Aircraft, both expected to bid, wanted a cruising speed of Mach 13, as this was technically impossible and would allow them to do lucrative design work until the entropic death of the solar system. A time-honored principle of governmental contraction is that if you are paid to solve a problem, the last thing you want is to succeed, because you then stop getting paid. This explains the anti-ballistic-missile program, racial policy, and Congress.

The matter of social consciousness arose. Half of the fighter pilots were women, as prescribed by law in 2016. To facilitate gender equity, a bracket in the pilot´s seat was mandated, to hold a telephone book for the flier to sit on so she could see out the windshield.  Since many pilots were single moms, the design included a drop-down changing table in the cockpit.

These gender-friendly measures were championed by Dacowits, who is not a Polish mathematician but the Defense Advisory Committee on Women in the Services. These ladies subscribe to the principle that if a thing weighs more than twenty pounds, it ought be left on the damned truck.

All buttons and switches on the Rabid Bat were to be labeled in English, Spanish, Choctaw, and Tloxyproctyl. This latter was the language of an obscure tribe of seven primitives in the Amazon rain forest. Tloxyproctyl  consisted of seven words, none of which meant anything. The tribe had been discovered when one of its members, named Wunxputl, had fallen into the Atlantic atop a log and washed up on Miami Beach. Thinking that an airliner he saw must be God, he enlisted in the Air Force. The EOST (Ethnic Outreach and Sensitivity Training) program had done the rest.

Secondary considerations were next addressed, such as speed, range, armament, and stealth. Critics again pointed out that none of these mattered, since Afghan weddings and lightly armed peasants could be blown up more cheaply with drones, which in any event were more agile than great honking piloted fighters. In fact, Reytheon was working on wedding-recognition software, which went swimmingly and was only 1700% over budget. A maverick in Congress suggested that the Rabid Bats be lined up on a runway and used as planters for geraniums, but was not taken seriously.

Lockheed-Martin said that the price of the program would only be about $987 billion, a steal. Historically-minded critics predicted that after the program was too far along to be abandoned, Lockheed-Martin would discover that the price would be…heh…rather more. This is a standard part of military contracting, with its own accounting category.

A prototype was duly built. Early flight trials began. It was then discovered by the investigative reporter Nickolas Fervently of the New York Times that due to a design error, the guns of the Rabid Bat pointed backward. A redesign, his sources had told him, would cost about $345 billion.

A flap ensued. It sufficiently threatened the flow of funds that Lockheed´s CEO, E. Johnston Farad, called a press conference. “It is necessary to understand the truly revolutionary nature of this aircraft,” he said, “It is so stealthy that the enemy will not detect the Rabid Bat until it has dropped its bomb load. Consequently, it will only use its guns to fire backward at a pursuing enemy.” Congress was so impressed by this advance that it increased the buy by forty aircraft.

Critics persisted in pointing out that the Rabid Bat was simply unnecessary.  Moslem goat-herders were already being efficiently slaughtered by psychopaths sitting at screens in the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. Lockheed responded that by pure happenstance, parts for the plane were to be manufactured in all fifty states, creating jobs. The plane was thus seen by all fifty governors to be essential to national security.

Reporter Fervently of the NYT looked suspiciously at the massive plant being built in West Virginia to make special tires for the plane. Production would be 431 tires per Rabid Bat per year. He wrote a column suggesting that the Rabid Bat would be the first combat eighteen-wheeler.  He was dismissed as a crank. Surely, said Lockheed, it never hurt to have enough tires.

Conservative senators replied that Fervently obviously hated America and wanted it conquered and enslaved by enemies surrounding the country. Fervently pointed out that the United States was surrounded by Mexico, Canada, and two oceans. Mexico would not conquer America and thus disrupt its biggest drug market, and Canadians needed overflight rights to Cancun in winter. These considerations ensured amity.

The noted military scholar Damian Isby at the Rand Corporation circulated an eyes-only paper saying that the military irrelevance of the Rabid Bat was vital to the health of the defense industry and thus to national security. To the arms makers, he said, victory and defeat were equally odious, as both reduced the purchase of weaponry. A good war was an interminable war. The Rabid Bat, having no military purpose, would not upset the balance with the Taliban, and would thus keep America free.

Serial production began. The Republic was safe.

From Lewrockwell.com, here.