Steyn's latest

Back from Memorial Day Weekend fun and observation, and back to the real world, which continues to crash about us. It took Rome a bit to fall - it's going to take The United States much less time. What a shame:

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EVCA serves two rural counties with a combined total of a little over 40,000 households. If you wanted to stimulate the economy, you’d take every dime allocated to Windsor and Windham counties under ARRA and divide it between those households. But, if you want to stimulate bureaucracy, dependency, and the metastasization of approved quasi-governmental interest-group monopolies as the defining features of American life, then ARRA is the way to go. Oh, you scoff: ARRA, go on, you’re only joking. I wish I were. We’re spending trillions we don’t have to create government programs to coordinate the application for funds to create more programs to spend even more trillions we don’t have.

The stimulus will do nothing for the economy, but it will dramatically advance the cause of statism (as Mark Levin rightly calls it). Last week’s vote in California is a snapshot of where this leads: The gangster regime in Sacramento is an alliance between a corrupt and/or craven political class wholly owned by a public-sector union-bureaucracy extortion racket. So what if the formerly Golden State goes belly up? They’ll pass the buck to Washington, and those of us in non-profligate jurisdictions will get stuck with the tab. At some point, the dwindling band of citizens still foolish enough to earn a living by making things, selling things, or providing services other than government-funded program coordination will have to vote against not just taxes but specific agencies and programs — hundreds and thousands of them.