"It profits me but little that a vigilant authority always protects the tranquillity of my pleasures and constantly averts all dangers from my path, without my care or concern, if this same authority is the absolute master of my liberty and my life."

--Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

Saturday, March 2, 2013

Steyn Asks the Important Question

Mark Steyn, writing today in NRO:

Can you pierce the mists of time and go back all the way to the year 2007? Back then, federal spending was 40 percent lower than it is today. In a mere half-decade, has all that 40 percent gravy become so indispensable to the general welfare that not even a teensy-weensy sliver of it can be cut?

Steyn answers his own question in a great interview with Hugh Hewitt:

What’s crazy about this is that let’s pretend that the officials who are speaking on this, the cabinet secretaries who are coming out and telling us that the world will come to an end tomorrow, that the planes are going to be dropping from the skies, that our infants and seniors are going to be dying untended in hospitals, that your shower head is going to be blasting out fecal coliform on you in the morning, that all of this is going to be happening just for his hypothetical $40 billion dollars of so-called entirely phony sequestration cuts, now assuming they’re not just lying to us. They’re basically telling us that nothing can ever be done about Washington spending ever. If $40 billion of hypothetical cuts means that the planes are dropping from the skies, and Obama’s even cancelled the deployment of a carrier to the Gulf, you know, in other words, when the Iranians go nuclear, he’ll be able to say oh, I would have stopped that, but we were all tied up with the sequestration. Sequestration is what allowed the mullahs to go nuclear. If that’s true, nothing can ever be done about anything ever, and Washington might as well just close up and go home.
 
 Great stuff.

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