Practice What You Preach
Governor Daniels was in town the other day to speak with the Carmel Chamber of Commerce on areas of government waste they had identified and possible ways to reduce and eliminate such waste. According to the Carmel Topics paper, he had found cases such as $8,000 copiers that could have been purchased for $3,000. There were also the floor mats that were rented and eventually cost more than if they'd been purchased. Who rents floor mats anyway? Another fun fact was the last toll stop in Gary where they discovered it cost an average of 34 cents to collect the 15 cent toll. Nice.
Daniels, for his part, has been doing what he can to curb and eliminate these little morsels of bureaucratic waste and I applaud him for it. Unlike his former boss, President Bush, Daniels seems actively engaged in wanting to streamline government and reduce areas that are a drain on the budget. If he could only learn to control his desire to use additional taxation as a means to further improve the budget condition, he'd be a very effective governor.
On the very same front page of Topics that discusses how Daniels is eliminating government waste, there's an article on Zionsville's consideration of the 1% restaurant tax that several towns, including my own Carmel, have already passed. This tax is Daniels' prized baby. The Topics article acts as a bit of a cheerleader for the tax, noting it could bring up to $100,000/year in revenue for "infrastructure improvements" for Zionsville. Doesn't that sound quaintly vague? A town that bills itself on being historic and unchanged looking to improve itself with a new tax. That's a good one.
Only one councilman, Art Harris, cast a dissenting vote, noting he'd rather park and road-impact fees be used to better the old historic downtown district. At least there was one voice of reason on the council. The article finishes with noting that the improvements will keep the crowds coming in.
Two things worth noting to rain on that little parade are that the idea of taxing people to make them come to your area more often in and of itself borders on idiocy. The other item of note is, as was noted in the Indianapolis Star recently, projected revenues aren't always CONFIRMED revenues. There's no guarantee you'll get that money, and if the tax causes some customers to go elsewhere, that's really going to cut into "projections". Also, economic downturns, poor business performance, and new retail areas opening up might cut into the projected revenues.
But governments don't think in terms of reality. They think in terms of projections. It's a quaint fantasy-realm where all their pet projects are fully-funded and the people happily give over money to accomplish that fact. Unfortunately, we have to live in reality, the reality of failed initiatives and floated bonds and resistant population and changing market forces. This likely will throw cold water on the ideas and projections of these deranged councilmen, but only after We the People foot the bill. Why not consider working that in your next speech on the responsibilities of government, Governor Daniels?
Governor Daniels was in town the other day to speak with the Carmel Chamber of Commerce on areas of government waste they had identified and possible ways to reduce and eliminate such waste. According to the Carmel Topics paper, he had found cases such as $8,000 copiers that could have been purchased for $3,000. There were also the floor mats that were rented and eventually cost more than if they'd been purchased. Who rents floor mats anyway? Another fun fact was the last toll stop in Gary where they discovered it cost an average of 34 cents to collect the 15 cent toll. Nice.
Daniels, for his part, has been doing what he can to curb and eliminate these little morsels of bureaucratic waste and I applaud him for it. Unlike his former boss, President Bush, Daniels seems actively engaged in wanting to streamline government and reduce areas that are a drain on the budget. If he could only learn to control his desire to use additional taxation as a means to further improve the budget condition, he'd be a very effective governor.
On the very same front page of Topics that discusses how Daniels is eliminating government waste, there's an article on Zionsville's consideration of the 1% restaurant tax that several towns, including my own Carmel, have already passed. This tax is Daniels' prized baby. The Topics article acts as a bit of a cheerleader for the tax, noting it could bring up to $100,000/year in revenue for "infrastructure improvements" for Zionsville. Doesn't that sound quaintly vague? A town that bills itself on being historic and unchanged looking to improve itself with a new tax. That's a good one.
Only one councilman, Art Harris, cast a dissenting vote, noting he'd rather park and road-impact fees be used to better the old historic downtown district. At least there was one voice of reason on the council. The article finishes with noting that the improvements will keep the crowds coming in.
Two things worth noting to rain on that little parade are that the idea of taxing people to make them come to your area more often in and of itself borders on idiocy. The other item of note is, as was noted in the Indianapolis Star recently, projected revenues aren't always CONFIRMED revenues. There's no guarantee you'll get that money, and if the tax causes some customers to go elsewhere, that's really going to cut into "projections". Also, economic downturns, poor business performance, and new retail areas opening up might cut into the projected revenues.
But governments don't think in terms of reality. They think in terms of projections. It's a quaint fantasy-realm where all their pet projects are fully-funded and the people happily give over money to accomplish that fact. Unfortunately, we have to live in reality, the reality of failed initiatives and floated bonds and resistant population and changing market forces. This likely will throw cold water on the ideas and projections of these deranged councilmen, but only after We the People foot the bill. Why not consider working that in your next speech on the responsibilities of government, Governor Daniels?
posted by Rob Beck | 10:50 AM
6 Comments:
You know, I once had the impression that a man carrying the nickname "The Blade" was going to be chopping apart budgets with the chainsaws and scooping out pork with the front-end loaders. Alas, all I've seen is the use of the penknife and the tweezers, tweaking this and 'making more efficient' that.
Well, that's today's GOP for you. Distant is the memory of Ronald Reagan, much less Barry Goldwater. Republicans aren't fiscal conservatives, but something they call 'fiscally responsible', which means: budgets may be balanced, but if higher taxes are required, so be it.
Where it really gets crazy is were government bodies hold the line or actually cut their budgets. The elected officials sprain their elbows congratulating themselves at the time of the passage of the budgets, and department heads squeal. Never fear, though- a few months down the line, one by one, the department heads will quietly appear before the County Council or other body and request an 'emergency appropriation'. The Council will grant it. In this way, the Council remains in the memory of the people as having passed an austere budget, but they end up spending well beyond that original figure. The department heads and Council members walk away equally satisfied at the end of the day.
The Hamilton County Council will prove illustrative of this. In fact, the department heads have already begun making their appearances for extra appropriations.
I'm afraid it will take regular citizens to appear at meetings and to speak out- something they have been most reluctant to do. The Libertarian Party provides this kind of watchdog service, but the average citizen has no idea that it's even going on.
Sadly, yes, and that's the real trick, isn't it? Getting people to show up at the meetings and call these schmoes on this. Or, getting someone to stand up at election time and say "Do you know what they did to you last year, those people you voted in?"
Of course, one needs money and a montivated mass behind you, and the political system has practically ensured that third parties get neither.
I've been reading Lew Rockwell for a few years, and I've come to be quite fond of libertarian philosophy, but I've also come to the conclusion that it's not compatible with democratic rule, since polis will always be able to win votes by enacting policies that benefit one group at another's expense, and the best politicians are the ones who learn to sustain an equilibrium which wouldn't exist at all without an interventionist government.
Incidentally, I wanted to invite you and your readers to DC Debate, a site started by a couple college students for the purposes of opening a channel of back-and-forth discussion. They're running a good site so far, but lack the resources for effective advertising, so they've asked their readers -- including me -- to spread the word. You can probably work out a link exchange if you're interested.
Libertarianism was quite compatible with our country, right up until the widespread introduction of socialism. The idea of self-reliance, personal responsibility in liberty, and doing for yourself were core beliefs for the earliest Americans and Americans up until the likes of Eugene V Debs. Perhaps even before him.
The problem, really, is power. Government accumulates power at the expense of the governed. The only thing that stops that is an educated, well-informed, and active populace, which is very hard to achieve and maintain.
There's also government using force to grow its power, like the Civil War. The problems you speak of, where politicians play to interest groups, have likely been with us since the beginning. They have become a festering cancer, though, since the New Deal and then infiltrated most all of our culture after the "Great Society" programs.
By not only catering to special interests, but paying off the masses with inadequate and woefully inefficient government programs at the expense of individual and business economic activity, government officials and those in the corporate structure who came to depend on government subsidy or "corporate welfare" cemented themselves in positions of power.
The only question we seem to face is, do we want what's left of our freedom eroded quickly, or slowly?
Libertarians may not be winning that fight right now, but we are a voice, and we at least fight. Maybe it's the whole "better to die on my feet than serve on my knees" mentality. I don't know. I just know I won't make it easy for them, and I'll let anyone else know who I can. Even a giant can die from a thousand pin pricks.
FDR's measures were a response to what had the potential to become very severe uprisings related to the Depression. And the Depression was a product of the collapse of the war economy.
Once we had opened the Pandora's Box of militarism, it was either socialism (to quell the angry mob) or fascism (to brutally enforce order), out of necessity, because the first priority of a government is always to preserve itself. And this is exactly my point. Between those two options, the people will always choose appeasement. Democracies tend toward socialism.
As long as the war machine exists as a massive, market-distorting government program, band-aids will be necessary to alleviate the pain of those market distortions -- to keep the people from becoming too angry and simply withdrawing their consent. But we can't very well dismantle the war machine, can we? Until that becomes possible (never, in all likelihood), we're stuck with this current state of affairs.
In fact, the only sustainable form of libertarian-anarchist state I can think of is the feudal monarchy, where the head of state owns everything, and therefore makes the rules, and has the requisite power to enforce those rules, typically by contracting with others to carry out his will.
With that said, we could certainly move in the right direction by removing authority from the federal government and returning it to the states -- starting with the pursestrings, the federal income tax. But I don't know if that's even possible any more.
We're no longer a trade/defense alliance, we're a nation, one people, with one government and a bunch of withering administrative bodies which will be totally irrelevant before too long.
And this is why I remain a liberal, in spite of everything.
To clarify, though I believe in libertarian principles, I think that their "proponents" in what passes for our political mainstream aren't really interested in shrinking government or reducing interference, but in redirecting Leviathan to serve their ends, while the rest of us pay for it. So I can't get on board with what's called conservatism today. The Reeps currently in charge, for example, obviously don't have any problem with wealth-redistribution programs. They just favor a different distribution pattern that the socialists before them.
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