That government is wasteful has been a rallying cry from Reagan onward. Republicans have gleefully been cutting waste since then, so we’ve had nearly four decades of intense scrutiny of government waste. There is very little left! While each new finding of any waste is trumpeted from the hilltops, no mention is made of the numerous agencies and offices which are operating on shoestring budgets and, in many cases, operating at low efficiency because they are too starved of cash to do their jobs effectively.

This is the two-pronged attack, a maniacally evil strategy from the brains of the John Birch Society, the Koch brothers and their minion ‘think’ tanks, and Grover Norquist. They wish to institute their libertarian paradise, but what gets in their way is that most Americans don’t actually share their desires. Most Americans tend to favor the kind of smart policies that balance the needs of enterprise with the needs of society - laws that harness the engine of capitalism to work broadly in service of everyone.

Only by driving a wedge in between the American populace and government, and between the non-union worker and the union worker, and between the middle class and the poor, and between the poor and the immigrant - to the point that everyone is now against everyone else - could they succeed in creating such visceral hatred so wide and so deep in the populace that we would have no sense of society left. When we cease to feel like we’re all in this together, we cease to feel a responsibility for the common good, when we show no concern for the pillaging of the commons, we laugh haughtily at the misfortune of others, we joke about the failure of our institutions and collectively we stick our heads in the sand and turn to salve our sorrows with the solace of drugs or numb ourselves with our mindless entertainment, we step closer to the now-inevitable collapse of our great experiment in democracy, our once powerful leadership fallen to depths of ridicule and our empire crumbled.

Those rich men who directed our demise might initially celebrate the arrival of their libertarian paradise, but with a limping husk of a state left, even a minimal order won’t last for long, and their wealth - in money that has little lingering value won’t shield them from the pains of society collapsed. Their land is only theirs if recognized by a government, and if property rights are respected. I suspect that it won’t be long until all are consumed in anarchy, followed by formation of groups of violent masses, led by ideologues who commandeer what bits of military hardware they can grab.

> Their land is only theirs if recognized by a government, and if property rights are respected.

Their land is only theirs if they can secure it from foreign aggression through a functional nuclear deterrent. However, operating a nuclear deterrent is a significant Big Government endeavor that is unlikely attainable by those chasing the so-called libertarian paradise.

That is the consequence of tearing down the government, if you tear down enough of it, you're not a patriot, you're literally handing it over to those you would call our enemies.

Surely they Koch brothers could purchase their own nuclear weapons

Perhaps, but can they maintain them? Secure them? Deploy them? Unlikely.

Judging by the public's belief in the effectiveness of Congress (e.g. approval ratings), I'd say the feeling that gov't is wasteful and ineffective is pretty widespread.

"There is tons of waste in government"

There's tons of waste in all human endeavor but I haven't seen any evidence that government is particularly good or bad.

>There's tons of waste in all human endeavor

I believe the argument stems from the difference between wasting your own money vs. wasting tax payer money.

>but I haven't seen any evidence that government is particularly good or bad

There's plenty of examples out there of the latter (you'll often see more criticism than praise on govt spending). For example, [1].

[1] https://www.heritage.org/budget-and-spending/report/50-examp...

That waste exists elsewhere matters not. There is no good or bad waste, waste is a pejorative term on its own. Ones with the power to should attempt to stamp it out when able (i.e. when said stamping costs don't outweigh the benefits).

Shuttering most of the Federal Government has been GOP platform since 1994 Contract With America.

Reagan’s whole schtick was that government is inherently useless.

e.g. “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: ‘I’m from the government and I'm here to help.’”

“One way to make sure crime doesn't pay would be to let the government run it.”

“Government is like a baby. An alimentary canal with a big appetite at one end and no sense of responsibility at the other.”

etc., and unfortunately this rhetoric was very effective as advertising/propaganda, noticeably shifting public attitudes.

His platform was largely about cutting taxes, deregulation, privatizing public institutions and infrastructure, reducing or eliminating government services, ...

Not sure you can blame the rhetoric alone as such sayings have been around for a long time. viz. Mark Twain: "It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress."

p.s., As far as I can tell he actually wrote this, which is somewhat unusual for such things.

Reagan’s policies were aligned with this rhetoric... or at least, the rhetoric was used as justification for the policies, which e.g. shifted the tax burden from the rich toward the middle class by cutting taxes on income (in particular slashing the top marginal rates) and inheritance, hiking payroll taxes, and using Social Security money to pay for general federal expenditures.

That was a man who cried incessantly about the evils of government spending while wiping his tears with the money before throwing it down a black hole. One of the greatest bullshit artists in the history of American politics.

> "Government is like a baby..."

... so let's starve it to death, because that's what you normally do with babies. I always knew that Reagan was a dementia victim, but not that he was so bad at metaphors.

The whole “starve it until it can be drowned in a bathtub” thing is from Grover Norquist, whose anti-tax pledge has been signed by almost all Republican lawmakers for decades.

Norquist was a Reaganite though. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Reagan,_Abramoff,_Norquis...

> “One way to make sure crime doesn't pay would be to let the government run it.”

This is hilarious. A rehash of Friedmans' if the state had monopoly of the sahara, it would run out of sand in 5 years.

On the case in hand, equifax is a not a poster case for advocating for more regulation.

> On the case in hand, equifax is a not a poster case for advocating for more regulation.

Not following. Why not?

Equifax is not the result of a free market or lack of regulation, its a company that subsists in an artificial high barrier to entry space, where strange things happen like equifax is not liable for the mistakes it makes (which are grotesque and frequent).

Equifax receives government protection, not scrutiny, so more regulation means more protection..

In what world would more competition and less regulation cause Equifax (or a company like it) to do a better job securing Americans data? Few, if any, of its important customers were harmed.

Equifax has had a terrible rep as a service long before the hack. Even john oliver had a segment on it before the hack happened, on how an egregious number of reports are grossly innacurate (like 40%, i cant remember). That has to be bad even for the banks: bad credit reports equals bad loans.

Regulation tends to decrease the number of players and increase the size of the incumbents, particularly because it puts requirements that can only be done with big bucks.

But none of that has anything to do with securing Americans' data. Also, even if that 40% figure is true, which I doubt, it's not like banks are going to care until they run out of people they'd like to loan money to.

Meanwhile, regular non-bank Americans get screwed in ways that could have been mitigated by regulation. In economic terms, that's called an externality, a concept which is covered in any reasonable Econ 101 book. The foolish solution to a market failure is more market.

So how would less regulation around data security (which is the thing that this is about) prevent another Equifax? Remember, you and I are not Equifax's customers, so we have no ability to choose anything in this scenario.

You need responsibility not regulation. Sue equifax into oblivion.

Equifax took care of this possibility by taking advantage of the freedom they had to place binding arbitration clauses in their customer agreements.

Unless you're independently wealthy, taking Equifax on by yourself in court is a non-starter. This, of course, was the point of adding these clauses in the first place.

I don't buy that, mainly because that only works if I can afford to sue those doing wrong. Most people cannot. Hence, why the government is there: to uphold these laws, and use everyone's collective resources to do that.

Class action lawsuits are pretty good at that. Which is what equifax is going through.

There are two problems with this view:

1) Sophisticated corporations have developed legal loopholes to eliminate their vulnerability to class actions. Wells Fargo used this tactic to have the lawsuits about the fraudulent accounts it created dismissed [1]. Equifax may or may not be able to benefit from similar provisions (they had one on their website terms of use, which their twitter said didn't apply to the breach as they were getting PR flak for it).

In a move you doubtless approve of, the regulation that would have restored consumer access to the legal system was repealed [2].

2) Money damages in a class action lawsuits aren't going to really make the victims of the Equifax breach whole. Valuing your leaked personal data is very difficult, as is proving that an identity theft was performed with information leaked from a particular source, and both of these will work in Equifax's favor in court. The data has been leaked, and a lawsuit isn't going to put it back into a bottle, nor is it likely to financially chastise Equifax adequately.

[1] http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-wells-fargo-arbitratio...

[2] https://www.cnbc.com/2017/10/24/senate-kills-cfpb-rule-on-ar...

Are you going to start lobby to make it illegal for companies to put anti-class action clauses in their ToS? Are you going to lobby to make it illegal for a company to force mandatory binding arbitration on their customers? If not, then you're just trying to have your cake and eat it too. You're trying to keep the government from punishing wrongdoing, and trying to keep people from the very few remedies they have.

In what manner does Equifax receive government protection? (Aside from Mulvaney's dereliction of duty in this case)

Yes, the old Contract On America is finally bearing fruit.

Better understood as the "Contract on America" (complete with crosshairs).

What do you expect after giving the CIA decades of experience to kneecap other countries democracies and economies - they'll put that valuable knowhow to use internally eventually for their own profit.