Remember how the Feds needed to find a new job for the “Revenuers” after the repeal of prohibition and they were given the regulation of firearms with NFA34?
We should do the same thing with the ATF by retasking them with the regulation legal sale of marijuana as we go through the process of reducing Federal regulation of firearms.
The DEA? Those that can’t get a real job can just go beg on the street corner with a sign around their neck that says “Former DEA Agent”.
I think the signs should say “Not professional enough”.
“Will break down doors for food.”
This may be a little off topic but related: I have often wondered in practical terms how the Federal Government could be reduced to its proper size without causing massive unemployment due to the millions of government workers and contractors who no longer have a function. That’s certainly no justification for keeping the .gov at its current size, but it’s a barrier. I think someone (maybe you) said it would be better to just keep paying them for a few years, until the economy has expanded enough to absorb them, so they aren’t interfering with our lives.
Lyle,
Maybe we could give them new careers as firemen.
Jason; Painful as it would be, if given a choice between the two, I’d rather pay most feds to do nothing (or snort coke, watch daytime TV, drink booze and buy whores) than pay them to do what they’re doing now (in addition to snorting coke, drinking booze and buying whores that is). That’d be a step in the right direction, say, for a while, before they’re indicted.
If I had my full ‘druthers I’d see them stripped of their citizenship, packed into crates, stuffed into transport planes, flown over Venezuela (or Cuba, North Korea, etc.) and dropped, along with their supporters in Congress. Parachutes optional, depending on donations from the private sector. I’d suggest using them on the front lines in battle, but I wouldn’t trust them in that capacity. They’d most likely throw up the white flags and then side with the enemy against our real troops. The whole tar and feathers thing seems unnecessarily messy and time consuming. We have work to do after all, and if we could simply get rid of them as quickly as possible, we could get on with living our lives in peace. If they’d go voluntarily and then mind their own business for the rest of their lives, that would be the ideal, though we all know that’s an impossibility – statists, who understand nothing on Earth but deception and brute force don’t ever quit until quitting is the only option left. Even then, we see what happened with Jim Jones and his dupes. If they know they’re going to take the big fall, they’ll take as many as possible along with them. That’s axiomatic and it goes for the whole statist society.
We do live in interesting times.
Sad thing is, even if those Agencies won’t have a viable role, they’ll still exist. The excess will just be absorbed into the New Kid On The Block, the TSA. After all, some is needed to pat down all those 70 year old Grandmas getting on the Greyhound to visit their grandkids in St. Louis, right? God forbid you stop some 22 year old Palestinian from getting on a 747 and search them, right?
In “Give Me Liberty” (aka “Credo”), Rose Wilder Lane discussed the clerks busy writing down the details of every little purchase, fulfilling a decree given by Napoleon over a hundred years before that writing. One justification for this decree was “what would become of all those clerks, and all those people who guard the warehouses where these records are kept, etc?”
Rose explained that there are two forms of unemployment here: First, a lot of people are unemployed as they wait in line to pay for their goods; they could be off somewhere else, being productive. Second, even the “support staff” for this regulation is unemployment, because those clerks, warehouse guards, et al, could be put to work doing something else…and there’s always something else for people to do!