Keep Government Closed: New at Reason

Government shutdowns are opportunities to reveal how unnecessary much of government is.

John Stossel writes:

The government is open again. That’s too bad.

One day, one of these shutdowns should be permanent. We would still have far more government than the Founding Fathers envisioned.

That’s because even during so-called shutdowns, a third of federal employees—nearly a million people—remain on the job, declared “essential” government workers. Military pay continues, too, although political commentators, eager to make a shutdown sound scarier, repeatedly claimed that military families were being cut off.

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