Here's a soft lie that must be debunked before it gets off the ground!

[TrollBuster9090]

30. All very true! It's even MORE clever than Norquist's 'starve the beast' strategy.

Norquist's 'starve the beast' strategy is to let govt. increase in size and expense, while cutting off tax revenues and borrowing the difference, until the whole thing collapses under it's own debt.

This strategy goes a step beyond, and actually allows political cronies to LOOT government BEFORE it collapses, and win both ways, by not only destroying those government agencies you don't like, but PROFITING from them before they go down.

Thomas Frank summed up the racket pretty well in his book "The Wrecking Crew," (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wrecking_Crew_(book)), and so it's not surprising that the plutocratic class and those who aspire to that class would try this. What IS surprising is that the civil servants who BELIEVE that government can be an influence for the good would LET them do this without any apparent resistance whatsoever.

Remember Alan Greenspan's testimony about how he was surprised (SHOCKED I tell you!) that the people who run businesses and banks would actually run those businesses into the ground with reckless, short sighted decisions? Well, nobody should be surprised that a trader at Barron's (like Nick Leeson) would be willing to risk bankrupting the company he works for in the quest of a million dollar bonus. The risk of losing your job when the company goes under if your guess wrong is FAR outweighed by the possibility of getting millions in bonuses if you guess right, and nobody should be shocked by that. Nobody should be surprised that the Austrian theory of 'enlightened self interest' doesn't really exist in the REAL world of business. But I'm totally shocked that it also doesn't exist in the civil service!