Clockwise, top left: US Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) addresses senate health care legislation at the US Capitol in Washington; a US chopper in Iraq's Green Zone; Holiday travelers wait in line to go through security at Los Angeles International Airport in Los Angeles, Saturday, Dec. 26; Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner.

An agonizing yet fun read by Michael Lind, a liberal... groaning over the ineptness of big government...

... and he asks a pretty good question... "Why do we pay these guys?

Read the entire article... and enjoy... as you consider big government wanting to take over... well... just about everything.
Salon opinion... bumbling

Can't our government get anything right?
Whichever party's in charge fumbles the basics -- security, health, infrastructure. Why are we paying these people?
By Michael Lind

I have a confession to make. I have been suffering from painful flashbacks lately. Memories of the 1970s force themselves, unbidden, into my mind. Memories of the high school assembly where we students were handed WIN (Whip Inflation Now) buttons.

Grownups who were unable or unwilling to take the policy measures necessary to reduce inflation told us children that price inflation was our personal responsibility, just as similar cowards and charlatans today tell us that addressing global warming is a moral responsibility of ordinary people, not a technological issue to be resolved by governments and utilities. I remember the U.S. retreat under fire from Indochina under President Gerald Ford and the debacle of the Desert One mission to rescue the American hostages in Iran under President Jimmy Carter....

.... Money can be found by Democratic and Republican administrations alike to bail out campaign contributors on Wall Street, but not to repair our crumbling infrastructure.

The U.S. fought and won World War II in less time than it took to adequately protect U.S. soldiers against primitive weapons in Iraq....

...And now the narrowly averted Christmas massacre in the skies above Detroit. I don't think I'm overreacting when I say that if ever overreaction on the part of a citizenry has been justified, it is now. We the people deserve to be angry. It's not as though Abdulmutallab came up with a clever new tactic while our national security agencies were focused on the last tactic. He used more or less the same tactic as the "shoe bomber," Richard Reid, and nevertheless got through every layer of international and national security....

.... The reality as well as the perception of government incapacity threatens liberalism more than conservatism....

...America's modest and inadequate system of social democracy rests on economic growth made possible by effective government provision of basic public goods. Economic growth in turn rests on physical security — the protection of citizens against criminals in their midst and hostile or law-breaking foreigners. Libertarians to the contrary, the indispensable preconditions for the free society are effective armed forces and police forces, be they citizen militias or professionals....

...it does mean that the party of activist government is doomed unless it is first and foremost the party of functioning, competent, basic government — national defense, law enforcement and functioning public utilities, including utility banking.

Not all Democrats are progressive, but in our two-party system, the Democrats are the more progressive party. At the moment the relatively progressive party owns the national government, and the national government's first job is to control its own borders, keeping out enemies like Abdulmutallab. National defense requires striving to eliminate illegal immigration and punishing those who break our immigration laws because the same lax law enforcement that permits the "good" illegal immigrant nanny to cross the border and the "good" foreign student to overstay her visa inevitably empowers terrorists and criminals.

Democrats shouldn't see this as an irksome task that is necessary to win the credibility they need for their social insurance reforms. Like the progressives and New Dealers, they should take it for granted. Physical security comes before economic security.

It wasn't my personal duty back in the '70s when I was a high school student to "whip inflation," and it is not my personal duty now to be vigilant in the airport or to be prepared on airplane flights to overpower a would-be mass murderer on a terrorist watch list who has brought easily detected explosives onto the plane. We hire politicians and pay public servants to do these tasks — not to try their best to do them, not to come up with procedures to make it likely they will be done, but to actually do them.

If our officials can't provide the basic goods of an advanced society — secure borders, safe streets, a functioning economic infrastructure — then we need to keep firing them until we find somebody who can do the job.

Hey Michael... you're sounding a lot like a conservative! At least you realize that a "progressive social" society must have security, industry, and personal responsibility... before it can play provider for all it's desired "social" programs.

I hope Washington reads your article! I've shared it.

xtnyoda, shalomed