The Specter of a Phony Government Shutdown
Posted by Anthony Gregory on March 24, 2011
In 1995, as the Republican Congress and Clinton administration came to an impasse over the budget, Americans endured a “shutdown” of the federal government. This “threat” is being held over our heads again, as the political branches today are employing the same histrionics and posturing that they did sixteen years ago.
Many of us who think the government is far too big, active, invasive and even tyrannical, are tempted to shout, “Oh, no! Please don’t throw us in the briar patch!” Unfortunately, we have as little to look forward to as the pro-government doomsdayers have to fear. The Boston Globe reports:
“A federal ‘shutdown’ is more like a massive downshift—the federal government reaches too deeply into the crevices of daily American life to close. Social Security payments would still be made. Air traffic controllers would scan the skies. The mail should arrive at the doorstep.”
Indeed, all we can expect to see is the National Parks and museums close—that is, the “nonessential” services undertaken by the federal government. This raises some questions.
First of all, why is the federal government doing anything that’s considered “nonessential”? If we are indeed facing the economically dire situation that Obama described in 2008—the greatest financial crisis since the Great Depression—shouldn’t a permanent shutdown of “nonessential” services be on the table?
Second, who decides what is essential and what is not? It seems to me that even back in 1995, when the federal government was much smaller than today, the number of federal employees mostly conducting nonessential work well exceeded the “10 percent of the executive branch’s 2.8 million civilian workers” who were temporarily furloughed by the dramatic government “shutdown.”
And third, why do they shut down the stuff that most Americans, regardless of ideology, do not object to? Don’t get me wrong. I’m as opposed to the government maintaining any sort of parks or museums as the next guy. But it is not as though these are the programs that demonstrate the most waste and abuse. What’s more, these are relatively benign functions of the state. Their financing is coercive and socially destructive, as they are maintained through taxation. But beyond that, unlike the regulations, the overbearing Justice Department, the FDA and ATF—the federal meddling in education, energy, food, medicine, charity and practically every nation under the sun—the Smithsonium and National Parks at least do not do much damage beyond how much they cost.
Indeed, the programs targeted as the first to go are almost always the ones that Americans actually value. Robert Higgs summed up the principle well:
“[H]ere’s the way to identify what it is that people really value about government. If you think about those occasions which come up every once in a while, when there’s some threat of government shutting down—maybe the public employees are threatening to strike or there’s some fiscal crisis—you’ll notice that the politicians always then come to the public and say, but if we shut down the government we won’t have any X. Right? Well, if you guys fill in the blank for X here, we’ll have identified a principle. And it was actually given a name one time. It’s called Fire the Firemen Principle.
“So when governments were threatened with a cutback in their revenues from a tax revolt or some such cause, the politicians would go out and say, Unfortunately, if this goes through, we’ll have to lay off all of these firemen. They know that that’s really what people want out of government: the ability to call the fire department when their house is on fire.
“There are a thousand other things the government has thrown into the mix for some special interest. Most people don’t give a damn about those things, and so they’re not mentioned when the threat of a government shutdown looms. Only the critical things that we really want government to do ever are brought up.
“Fire the Firemen. It’s also sometimes called, in D.C., Close the Washington Monument Principle, because all these tourists go to D.C. and they want to go up in the Washington Monument. Well, if they shut that down, all hell breaks loose in the nation’s capital. So that’s what they threaten to do first, the Park Service is going to close the Washington Monument. But this is just manipulation.”
We see this in local politics as well as on the national level. City governments and police unions around the country have threatened to no longer protect citizens from burglars and thieves—as opposed to rethinking their never-ending and expensive wars on vices like marijuana. We are warned that without supporting more tax increases, we’ll never get the road repairs most of us want to see—never is it suggested that government officials go without office renovations, or government contractors be scrutinized more carefully for graft and waste.
And yet, even shutting down the National Parks is probably an improvement over doing nothing about the fiscal crisis. At least then Americans might demand some serious cuts in other areas. In 1995, the politicians could still play budget games with the pretext that the financial ship could be turned around well before crashing. But our ship is now leaking from an iceberg collision and we need to change course fast before we drown.
On the question of the impending federal shutdown, here’s a way to tell if a politician is actually on the side of liberty or is just posturing, to determine if his fiscal conservatism goes beyond being for a couple billion dollars less in spending than the president: See if they blame the other side for the shutdown, or if they welcome it and indeed ask for more. In 1995, both parties pointed the finger at the other when the federal government was scaled back, temporarily, just a tiny bit. This, despite the Contract with America that the Republicans offered, supposedly promising a true retraction of the federal leviathan. Yet I predict most Republicans will gnash their teeth about how horrible it is that the government has been “shut down” and how irresponsible the Obama administration is being for not accepting their “reasonable” cuts—cuts that are so miniscule they have no chance of making any difference anyway.
I like visiting the National Archives and think Yellowstone is beautiful. But if “shutting” down the least bad parts of government has any chance of getting people to wake up about the need to slash the worst parts, perhaps we have no choice but to hope it happens. On the other hand, if they ever threatened us with a shutdown that meant a true reduction in federal power and “services,” a hiatus for half or more of the bureaucrats, a withdrawal of U.S. troops from Europe and the Middle East, a freezing of defense contracts, the closing of the Department of Education among other relatively new and completely redundant agencies, and the immediate introduction of means testing for federal entitlements—in that case I’d have to shout, bring it on!
