What about smaller government?
October 8th, 2008
One of the consistent themes of conservatives is smaller government and how we’ll all save lots of money if only government were smaller. Sounds good, doesn’t it?
Last year tens of thousand of pets died because melamine was put in pet food as a substitute for protein. Not long after that hundreds of Americans became sick from what we were originally told was tomatoes from Mexico. It turned out not to be tomatoes and the correct vegetable may not have come from Mexico, but hey, what the heck. Our beef cannot be exported to many countries because of fear of Mad Cow disease. Recently there was a big scandal in China with babies being poisoned by melamine in milk products. Initially we were assured that no tainted products had made their way into this country, but that’s not quite true. Melamine is showing up all over the place. For years now people have been complaining that their generic drugs are not performing as well as the name-brand drugs the generics are meant to substitute for. In some cases the generics are actually making people sick.
Smaller government means fewer inspectors at the Food & Drug Administration. Not to be facetious, but how’s that working for you?
Smaller government is a conservative canard. Yes, they mean cutting federal employees, but when they aren’t out to gut an agency they don’t believe in (like the FDA and it’s regulations on the pharmaceutical industry), they actually mean turning over government services to private industry. What a recipe for corruption. We’ve all seen the no-bid contracts coming out of the Iraq war, but I’m sure there are many more of these things that we don’t know about.
I remember when this discussion got started in the Reagan administration. Government bureaucracy at the time was bloated and unresponsive. Good luck finding friendly help when you called anyone. We were told this would all be fixed and money would be saved by having private business perform many government functions. It all made perfect sense.
And I have a bridge for sale.
The next administration, whoever it is, must cooperate with Congress, and Congress must actually do its job in ferreting out the corruption that has occurred under this administration. Money needs to be returned to the treasury and people need to go to jail. And we all have to think about what it really means when a politician says he or she is promoting smaller government.
Categories: Commentary, Government, Politics | Tags: Congress, FDA, mad cow, melamine, money, pets, pharmaceutical, regulations
