Almost every dwelling has some version of the “junk drawer.” It’s the place where both useful and useless objects lie in semipermanent repose, the “semipermanence” lasting years and decades. The drawer includes tools, and…. Why should I bother with a list? You need only open your own junk drawer to inventory objects lying helter-skelter. “Oh! I forgot I had this.” Or, “I wondered where that went. Geez, never can find it when I need it; I have to get my life organized.”
Government agencies are often the junk drawers of political ideas become expensive tax-funded duplicate and arguably frivolous programs. Take Nigerian agencies, for example. A report in 2019 found that of 719 Nigerian government agencies more than 100 do what other agencies do.* That’s the junk drawer of government redundancy. “But if you had just looked in the junk drawer, Mr. Politician, you would have seen we already have one of those agencies.”
Why mention Nigeria? Because I don’t want to become frustrated by naming all the redundant and wasteful agencies in the United States, agencies that have spent money on studies that connect drinking alcohol and visits to the ER, funding Serbian cheese (You read that correctly), paying for a Bob Dylan statue for the US Mozambique embassy, or addicting zebrafish to nicotine in the UK. The economic junk drawer of a big government is filled with a surprising number of superfluous objects.** It’s as though your own junk drawer reproduced another one, and another one, and another one, all accumulating from you more and more, all demanding more from you. And what will we do with this junk? And what will we do with redundant agencies to which we give little by little all our wealth without a return?
But forget the personal and community expense for a moment. Instead, think of the personal and community control lost to hundreds of thousands of pages of regulations written by the denizens of the redundant junk drawers. The accumulation of programs and regulations requires more junk drawers, more caretakers of the junk drawers, and more caretakers requiring more caretaker-assistants, all of who must justify what they do by adding more to the junk drawers in which they thrive.
*The Citizen. 18 Oct 2019. Online at https://thecitizenng.com/redundant-agencies-the-nation/
Accessed August 1, 2020.
**Schow, Ashe. Dailywire. 27 Nov 2019. Here are the most wasteful government projects in 2019. https://www.dailywire.com/news/here-are-the-most-wasteful-government-projects-in-2019
Accessed August 1, 2019.
Government agencies are often the junk drawers of political ideas become expensive tax-funded duplicate and arguably frivolous programs. Take Nigerian agencies, for example. A report in 2019 found that of 719 Nigerian government agencies more than 100 do what other agencies do.* That’s the junk drawer of government redundancy. “But if you had just looked in the junk drawer, Mr. Politician, you would have seen we already have one of those agencies.”
Why mention Nigeria? Because I don’t want to become frustrated by naming all the redundant and wasteful agencies in the United States, agencies that have spent money on studies that connect drinking alcohol and visits to the ER, funding Serbian cheese (You read that correctly), paying for a Bob Dylan statue for the US Mozambique embassy, or addicting zebrafish to nicotine in the UK. The economic junk drawer of a big government is filled with a surprising number of superfluous objects.** It’s as though your own junk drawer reproduced another one, and another one, and another one, all accumulating from you more and more, all demanding more from you. And what will we do with this junk? And what will we do with redundant agencies to which we give little by little all our wealth without a return?
But forget the personal and community expense for a moment. Instead, think of the personal and community control lost to hundreds of thousands of pages of regulations written by the denizens of the redundant junk drawers. The accumulation of programs and regulations requires more junk drawers, more caretakers of the junk drawers, and more caretakers requiring more caretaker-assistants, all of who must justify what they do by adding more to the junk drawers in which they thrive.
*The Citizen. 18 Oct 2019. Online at https://thecitizenng.com/redundant-agencies-the-nation/
Accessed August 1, 2020.
**Schow, Ashe. Dailywire. 27 Nov 2019. Here are the most wasteful government projects in 2019. https://www.dailywire.com/news/here-are-the-most-wasteful-government-projects-in-2019
Accessed August 1, 2019.
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