Albany County Rail Trail

I was reading the other day about Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s cuts to various agencies, outside of defense and policing. While I agree with Donald Trump and Elon Musk that we need to cut government spending, civilian agencies are not where the pork is. It’s in law enforcement and the sheer number of laws that need enforcing. If we had fewer laws, we could have fewer cops, fewer jails, fewer government officials. We need to transition law enforcement workers from public sector jobs to the private sector, where they can serve as an engine of economic growth rather than a tax on working folk. We need to repeal laws not create new ones. 

Our government has gotten too big and complicated. The fear of the evil doer in combination with the corporate war profiteers have swollen our defense department. Even though the threat of terrorism is insignificant we spend trillions going after a phantom enemy. It all needs to be shrunk. While I’m sure many men and women in uniform work hard, they should be re-trained for private sector jobs. They don’t all need to be eating out of the public trough. Government is too big and burdensome. 

While there is much that government does that is important, the over-regulation of private lives and the centralization of power is a threat to all Americans. Our leaders should work tirelessly to downsize government, not take from the neediest but from the fattest of fat cats that have made their billions profiting off of the fear of average Americans. Government should be in the business of repealing programs, especially unnecessarily punitive and expensive programs. Re-train government workers, and help them be the next generation of private sector professionals.

One way to shrink government is to end the war on drugs. It’s stupid to tell private citizens what they can or cannot do in their own private homes. I think all recreational drugs should be legalized. This would save billions in taxpayer dollars. If people want to use heroin and opioids recreationaly then that’s their choice to poison their bodies. People don’t die from overdoses, they die from consuming unsafe, unregulated illegal drugs. Government should stand back and only regulate these recreational substances to ensure their purity and safety, and to tax them to provide essential revenue including treatment programs from those who are addicted. Prohibition has always failed and its making our country broke with all the money we spend on corrections producing even more broken people.

Downside government. It’s the way we can move our country forward.