If you haven’t been living under a rock for the past week, you probably noticed that the federal government has been shut down for a few days.
However, even if you aren’t living under a rock, you probably haven’t noticed too many tangible effects on your own life resulting from this development. The stoplights still work. There haven’t been riots (anarchists, step up your game). They couldn’t even give us the common courtesy of canceling exams at a public university!
All this would probably point to the conclusion that you shouldn’t be worried about a government shutdown. As a person who believes that government generally does more harm than good, I would have to agree with that statement at face value. It is, unfortunately, not that simple.
Although I am not a huge fan of the government in general, it is essential that government does work reasonably well, at least well enough to perform the basic task of ensuring its own existence. If the government cannot fund itself, we should all be concerned by the prospect that the government will soon not be able to execute the tasks that even libertarians consider essential: protection of property, contract and national defense.
No matter who you are, it is in your interest to live under a competent government. It is part of the image that we transmit to the world.
If you’ve ever studied or traveled abroad, you probably have experienced this. When I was in India, every time I mentioned that I was from America, I was met with the response that it was a “beautiful country” or some variant of that. If people around the world see us as a country that cannot manage our own affairs, we cannot expect that reception to continue for much longer.
Closer to home, our University is funded partially by federal funds. The more dysfunctional our government becomes, the lower value we get in our education at UNC.
As a libertarian, I believe that the government in general should not be doing that much. But I also believe that government decisions should be taken rationally, as a result of compromise and not rigid ideological clashes.
This brings us to the real problem. Due to gerrymandering as a result of the 2010 census, many Republican congressmen are in such safe districts that it is safer for them politically to shut down the government than it is to make a reasonable compromise that might play well to the voters in a general election.
