He won’t be running for president, but Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels is willing to share with Human Events readers some secrets to cutting government spending while surviving politically.
If our Indiana experience tells us anything, it’s that many in our political class overestimate the degree of difficulty in diving into the excess government we have stacked up in America these last few decades. It could be that they mistake the angry self-interest of the middlemen—the “service providers,” the grantsmen, those who profit from helping government redistribute money—for representing a wider swath of opinion than they really do. When you scrutinize it closely, many of these interests are making up in decibels what they lack in numbers.
Again and again, we enacted reductions in the face of prefab protests and media hyperventilation, only to find in the aftermath that the general public was at least as interested in economy in government, low taxation and attracting private-sector jobs as in collecting (or seeing others collect) money trickling down through the coarse filter of government. I say to audiences with confidence these days, “You’d be surprised how much government you’ll never miss.”
