“If you pick any three letters from the alphabet at random and put them in any order, you get an acronym for a federal agency you could do without.” This joke was coined by Milton Friedman decades ago. It was true at the time, but it has become more true over the years as George Will has quoted it in columns and speeches.
The Constitution established a clear vision for the role of the federal government, limited in both scope and power. However, the government has deviated significantly from this blueprint. Currently, there are departments and institutions that are unrecognizable to the founders. Despite trillions of taxpayer dollars and decades or even centuries of intervention, these institutions have stunted economic growth, violated human rights, and eroded civil liberties. They have somehow managed to make air travel more frustrating, education more expensive, and drug enforcement more violent.
Below is a singular, non-exhaustive list of parts of government that we could definitely do without. We left untouched some functions specifically mentioned in the Constitution (hello, U.S. Postal Service!) and confined our outrage to the federal level. We also had to limit our magazines based on the amount of space they had (we didn’t lose any love for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, but we ran out of pages!), and the repeals we did I tried not to repeat the discussion. Most recently (we want to abolish NASA again, and we’ve advocated for it before). We are not advocating anarchism (at least not yet), we simply want to emphasize that the federal government was never meant to be all things to all people. It’s time to take a hard look at which agencies have earned their place and which are long past their expiration date.
Sometimes reform is the answer. The victory of freedom can and will be achieved through gradual change. But in some cases, especially when it comes to bloated bureaucracies of questionable constitutionality, it may be better to simply abolish them altogether.
read reasonThe “retire everything” problem:
This article was originally printed with the following heading: “Abolish everything.”
