When the National Park Service was threatened with budget cuts (in D.C. this means budget increases less than the pie-in-the-sky wish list of the bureaucracy in question) the head of the “service,” one George Hartzog, shut down the Washington Monument and Mount Rushmore. Members of congress from every state were bombarded with complaints by vacationing constituents about the shutdowns, so the talk of budget “cuts” ceased.
This form of political extortion came to be known as the “Washington Monument Syndrome” and is now routinely used at all levels of government to extort even more revenue from American taxpayers. At the local level of government there is never any admission that cost savings are possible. Instead, garbage collection, police, ambulance services, and school buses are shut down to teach the taxpayers a lesson whenever anyone opposes the bureaucracy.
When our socialist train system, Amtrak, was worried about budget “cuts” it once canceled train traffic in routes widely used by influential members of Congress. Over the years, Congress itself has learned that it, too, can play the Washington Monument Syndrome game by threatening a complete government shutdown whenever it is worried about the passage of one of its pork-infested, wasteful and abusive and mostly unconstitutional “spending bills,” such as the budget that was before Congress this week. The media become all abuzz with fearmongering about the absence of welfare checks, Medicare and Medicaid payments, Social Security checks, and on and on. Of course, since there is always seems to be enough in the budget to be able to send hundreds of billions to the dictator of Ukraine, paying all of these bills would be a drop in the bucket by comparison. Threatening their elimination is just another round of the Washington Monument Syndrome game.
After a five-week government “shutdown” in 2018 (because Democrats protested the building of a border wall) the Congressional Budget Office did a study and concluded – Surprise ! – that the economy grew faster during the shutdown and the stock market rallied when tens of thousands of federal bureaucrats were sent home without pay. Which begs the question, why just five weeks?
After President Trump proposed cutting the budget of the CDC from $11.5 billion to $7.7 billion in 2020, guess what? The CDC declared a pandemic, shut down not just the Washington Monument but the entire economy, and watched its budget increase exponentially. The federal bureaucracy was at the high water mark of its totalitarian powers. “Conservative” Senator Tom Cotton immediately called for shutting down the entire economy and urged the Fed to print up enough money to give everyone a “guaranteed annual income,” the long-held pipe dream of the Communist Party USA.
Instead of fearing another government shutdown Americans should be hoping and praying for one – and not just a five weeker. What a great Christmas gift to the entire nation that would be!
Originally Posted at https://mises.org/