More government won't make it smaller

(My Eastern New Mexico News column for February 12, 2025)

If you have an unfriendly neighbor, do you threaten your own family in an attempt to force the neighbor to behave? What if he threatened his family first? If all your friends jumped off a roof, would you jump, too?

What if your threat works and the bad neighbor changes his behavior like you wanted? Most people would still see your behavior as antisocial. Is it different if you're threatening the entire country you rule and we call the threat a tariff? Does this change your act from abuse to a negotiation?

Don't get me wrong: I appreciate Trump's willingness to go beyond what establishment types have been willing to do. I don't trust him, or anyone who sits in a government office, but he is an accomplished disrupter, and government needs to be disrupted.

I'd like to see it all scrapped and the parts scattered to the winds or sold off to the highest bidder to pay for restitution, but I'll take what I can get.

I love the apparent dismantling of some of the worst parts of the federal government, and I keep hoping for much more. I am loving the exposure of USAID's schemes and the meltdowns of those who see their crooked money spigot being turned off.

It's been tolerated far too long. A federal government staying within the limits established by the Constitution wouldn't need much money-- income taxes or tariffs. Even if taxes are constitutional, they are unethical.

My fondest fantasy is for every piece of infrastructure and every record held by the ATF to be run through a woodchipper, the chips burned in a furnace, and its criminal mission disavowed. In addition, every agency or bureau whose function is not explicitly ordered by the Constitution needs to be gone. I don't care if people have gotten accustomed to it and expect it to be there. Burn it.

Once again, the problem is too much government, and it is not a problem that can be solved with more government. We need less, much less.

Maybe this administration can do it. None of the others even attempted to or were willing to say that government is too big and powerful.

Yet, the solution won't be found in Big Government programs like socialist border enforcement or communist tariffs. You aren't the good guy if you threaten your own home to make everyone else in town do what you want. Liberty works; government fails.

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It's the WORST

Government makes me think of "Lesters: America's Cheapest Ammunition". It also "usually" works. From a certain point of view.

When it fails, it fails big.
Although, sometimes the way it works is worse than if it hadn't worked at all.

Government was supposed to protect the rights of the people, yet it became the primary threat to those rights. No freelance serial killer or mass murderer could even come close to government's body count. No cruel slavemaster in history approached the indifferent cruelty of government toward those it acts as though it owns.

Government makes up rules it claims will protect people from criminals, but those rules make people powerless against criminals.

It says it is protecting the environment, but remains the worst despoiler of the natural world that the world has ever seen.

It "protects" private property from crooks by stealing a percentage of our private property- and ALL of our property if we fail to pay the entire amount of the extortion.

It makes up rules to "protect" children; rules which hand them over to their worst enemies to do with as they please.

It "protects" us by making sure there's nothing left to protect.

We would all be better off without this sort of "help".

As with all such examples, a comprehensive list would be endless.

Government is literally the WORST. No one needs it except the criminals who are too cowardly to go freelance.

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