James Ostrowski
Lew Rockwell.com
November 8, 2010
How can we find out, and find out quickly, whether the newly elected tea party senators and representatives are serious? Many of us want to know if this will be a 1994 sellout all over again but we don’t want to wait two years to find out. (Granted, Murray knew right away but we are mere mortals.)
I have an idea. Let’s pick a federal agency that is arguably extra-constitutional, notoriously corrupt, useless, wasteful, and has a proven history of making life worse for almost everyone it touches (except the bureaucrats and contractors of course.) Let’s also choose an agency that has a sizable budget. Granted, the 1994 sellouts would not even cut the tiny subsidy to the NEA when I challenged them to do so the last time. But the tea party movement has raised the bar and we will not be satisfied with a miniscule “sacrifice.” No, this offering up of political power and pelf has to really “hurt.” It must be in the many billions of dollars. And it must be a complete elimination with no programs transferred to other federal agencies. Under true federalism, these functions could very well be absorbed by the states but that’s not our concern here. So be it. People can and do vote with their feet to escape high-tax states such as New York and fly to low-tax states such as New Hampshire. The Free State Project has institutionalized this efficient form of direct citizen action.
- A d v e r t i s e m e n t
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So, Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you the acid test which will allow us to know if these tea party officials are serious or are just a bunch of egotistical politicians seeking a DC diversion from life “down on the farm.”
The agency that they should abolish or at least de-fund is HUD. I could write a book about the damage HUD has wrought in its history and prominent libertarians James Bovard and Thomas DiLorenzo have exposed its failure in many articles over the years. A panoramic review will suffice here.
HUD has destroyed many urban neighborhoods and replaced them with gigantic Soviet-style public housing projects that are breeding grounds for crime and despair. In many cases, such as in my hometown of Buffalo, neighborhoods were destroyed and replaced by nothing! At 19:52 of The Incredible Bread Machine, Rothbard does a stand-up routine (sitting down) on how the federal bulldozer destroyed more housing units than HUD built. Billions of HUD development funds have been wasted (of course) and funneled into payoffs to contractors who kick back donations to keep the slimeballs in power. In Buffalo, about $556,000,000 was spent in recent years and it’s difficult to figure out where it went other than patronage jobs. HUD helped cause the mortgage meltdown by subsidizing mortgages that credit-unworthy home buyers could not afford. HUD is a poor manager of its properties, many of which are decaying and many of which have already been demolished. HUD has been called “the worst landlord . . . in the United States.”
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The actual solution to the problem of affordable housing is of course to be found in the free market. Government creates its own demand here as in other areas. First, it inflates the cost of housing through regulation, taxes and zoning. Then, it reduces the income of the poor through taxes, fees, occupational licensure, compulsory schooling and many other regulations. Having manufactured large numbers of poor people and created a shortage of affordable housing for them, it then created HUD in an attempt to solve the problem. It failed to solve that problem but created many new ones. It’s time to break the cycle of government failure leading to government programs that fail and create the demand for even more programs.
