Well, this is not the America I grew up in.
Good.
If you wanted to craft a Platonic ideal of wasteful government spending, you couldn’t do better than pre-game flyovers.
Buzzing sporting events or other large gatherings doesn’t keep our nation safe or educate children or provide a way to move goods and customers to market. It’s just an expensive special effect.
I enjoy a good special effect as much as the next guy, but I’d really prefer my tax dollars spent on, you know, national defense, schools, and roads.
If the Tigers or Major League Baseball or any other organization desperately wants planes buzzing their thing, they should reimburse the taxpayers for the cost. There’s no such thing as a free flyover by a squadron of military-grade jets. There shouldn’t be, anyway.
And, while we’re on the subject of sequester cuts, maybe instead of hand-wringing of the lack of million-dollar jets going zoom-zoom over Comerica Park, maybe you should take a moment to consider that sequester cuts will require the U.S. District Court in Los Angeles to close on Fridays and prevent some Medicare patients from receiving chemo treatments.
In so much as I don’t want to live in a country that can’t operate a functioning justice system and allows seniors (or anyone else) to drop dead from treatable forms of cancer, I’d like to see how we can, as a society, properly fund vital government functions like federal courts and Medicare.
Government, especially the limited sonstitutional government envisioned by our founders, exists to provide basic services to the whole of the citizenry. We’re talking about public safety and national defense, transportation infrastructure, public education, and what might be termed the social safety net, that is, programs like Social Security, Medicare, public health insurance, etc. Even the great free market thinker F.A. Hayek agreed on that last point.
There is no reason why, in a society which has reached the general level of wealth ours has, the first kind of security should not be guaranteed to all without endangering general freedom; that is: some minimum of food, shelter and clothing, sufficient to preserve health. Nor is there any reason why the state should not help to organize a comprehensive system of social insurance in providing for those common hazards of life against which few can make adequate provision.
It’s troubling that we aren’t worried about whether or not we’re able to “afford” these basic government services or how we pay for them. Instead, we’re concerned about some beer-and-circus fat trimmed from the underfunded federal budget or, as Huffington Post fretted, what will happen to the precious jewel convention industry in this post-sequestration America.
If you’re over the age of 12 and at all saddened by the lack of a flyover tomorrow, grow the #$%^ up. Republics don’t last long when they start slouching toward Idiocracy.
