The real way to shrink government:
Requiring the American people to actually pay for all of the government they receive is, as [William] Niskanen and others have convincingly argued, the most effective way to limit its growth. Right now the anti-tax bias of the Right results in shifting costs onto future generations who do not vote in today’s elections, and enables liberals to defend against spending restraints very cheaply. Instead of starving the beast, conservatives should serve the check.
Republicans have allowed their party to become a cult of Grover Norquist fiscal fetishists.
To Norquist, it all comes back to the “less than” symbol. His goal is not to perfect the tax code. He doesn’t aspire to make government work better. For him, tax cuts are a means to the end of shrinking government. “Our job,” he says, “is to make people free.”
As for me I’m with Thomas Hobbes on the freedom that government-free nature affords mankind: “No arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and shortâ€
