Drowning Governments, Killing People

Note: Michael Jay Tucker was formerly the editor of Liberal Resistance. He has elected to concentrate on on his own writing and videos. However, he has agreed to allow us to run some of his pieces on this site. Here is one of his recent essays, “Drowning Governments, Killing People,” which appeared in Tucker’s blog, explosive-cargo, on April 24, 2020.

There was a powerful piece over on the Washington Post’s website the other day. “When you drown the government in the bathtub, people die,” by Dana Milbank. In it, Milbank writes that for twenty-years he has been expecting a major and deadly pandemic to strike the world. In fact, he has devoted a good part of his career to warning the Powers That Be that such a thing was going to happen eventually and urging them to get ready.

And, for a while, it seemed the governments of the world were listening. In the United States, both the George W. Bush and the Obama Administrations made preparations for something awful to happened, and put defenses into place.

But, then, we got the Small Government movement. This is the idea that government should be as small and powerless as possible. (Mr. Milbank takes his title from a famous quote by anti-tax activist Grover Norquist who once said that he wanted a government that was so small he could “drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.”)

In theory, the idea behind this Libertarian, or perhaps pseudo-Libertarian theory of administration is that “less government means more freedom.” The reality is that it just transfers power from a government to a small class of wealthy men and women who no longer have any restraints on their behavior.

But, be that as it may, we had in Donald Trump the small government advocate par excellence, and we got a government that was indeed small…and which could not react to a major disaster. It might not be yet possible to the drown government in a bathtub, but thousands of Americans did drown…as their lungs fill with the fluids and debris that come with late-stage Covid-19.

As I say, this is a powerful piece. If you haven’t read it, give it a glance.

And then ask what you can do to prevent such a horror from happening again.

Answer? Vote, and vote blue.

Whatever you do and no matter who.