Snip, Snip, Snip...

There's a great quote by PJ O'Rourke:

"Every government is a parliament of whores. The trouble is, in a democracy, the whores are us."

With all this kerfuffle and apparent deep hatred of everything governmental related sweeping the land, it's a point worth making. We get the government we deserve- and to paraphrase H.L. Mencken we usually get it good and hard. But the problem we face today, as the 21st Century dawns is not necessarily the 'death of the west' that right-wing doom and gloomers so often opine about. Instead, we face a stark choice and a major problem: the 20th Century Welfare state is running out of steam. In fact, now that we're a decade into the 21st Century, it's starting to looking increasingly anachronistic, but what's a nation to do?

France is still in the grip of strikes and protests over plans to raise the retirement age to 62instead of 60. Britain has announced it's cutting 500,000 public sector jobs and over here in America? Well, something probably will get cut. Cynically, I would say it'll be a couple of years down the road when the government has no other options left and people take the streets and are PISSED off about, but I live in hope. The problem becomes defining this debate: the public sector, the private sector- conservatives would have us believe that the private sector deserves our love and support while public sector workers get fat off of the teat of taxpayer kindness.

Problem is, there are a lot of public sector jobs out there that we actually sort of need. I think we can all get behind firefighters, nurses and if you'll excuse my obvious conflict of interest, cops... someone's gotta put out fires, keep the streets safe and heal people. Teachers too. People gotta learn. (The problems with education in this country are a whole 'nother problem- but can we all agree, kids need to go to school and therefore need teachers?) Point is, there need to be some reforms- but conversely, in a lot of these jobs, there's not the potential to make millions like there is in the private sector, so benefits do matter more.

So how do we define this debate? It's not necessarily government that's a bad thing, it's rather wasteful government and the proliferation of bureaucracy. We should figure out what we need and what our priorities are and figure out a way to find that and nothing more. Maybe I'm crazy and that's an impossible task to take on, but before we start slashing government willy-nilly, we have to stop and think for a moment about the consequences: what do we really want our government to do for us? If it's as little as possible, that's fine, but there's also gotta be a bare minimum of priorities for the government to take on.

What do we want from our government as we enter the 21st Century and how do we pay for it? That's the real question we've got to answer, but one that neither party seems to be interested in answering. Republicans scream for smaller government, Democrats scream to save the one we've got, no one asks the tough questions- so stay tuned, because protests in our streets when they start cutting because they have to not because it's the fiscally prudent thing to do might not be so pretty...