God bless Paul for putting his consciousness on the line by reading the full text of Tim Pawlenty's economic speech. There but for the grace of laziness go I. And of course, the highlight from Pawlenty's speech, as Paul points out, is this little free-market/small-government libertarian gem about the so-called Google Test:
We can start by applying what I call “The Google Test.” If you can find a good or service on the Internet. Then the federal government probably doesn’t need to be doing it.
Really, Tim? Well, I guess that would solve all our budget woes, as there's pretty much nothing the government does that can't be found for sale on the Internet. National defense? Paid mercenaries have been around since the invention of war, and there are plenty of military contractors and private security firms. So that saves about $700 billion, or 20 percent, of the federal budget right there. Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and CHIP? They're all just insurance programs right? And there's sure as hell no shortage of insurance companies on the Internet, so the Google Test just saved taxpayers another another $1.4 trillion, or roughly 40 percent of the budget. Sweet. Scientific and medical research, education, transportation, even the courts—hello Judge Judy!—just about everything the government funds has a private sector complement. Go ahead. Pick a government agency. Try the Google Test for yourself.
No, it doesn't take more than a few minutes of Googling to discover that Pawlenty's Google Test pretty much strips the federal government down to its core function: servicing interest on the national debt. Hell, Google the word "president" and you'll find over one billion entries, at least a handful of which are presumably in the private sector. So it turns out Pawlenty is running for a job that by his own standard should't exist!
Hmm. Perhaps Pawlenty should've tried the Google Test himself before making it a centerpiece of his economic policy? In fact, despite the apparent ease of the test, Pawlenty's speech was surprisingly thin on actual proposed cuts, and even then, at least three of the four mentioned programs don't clearly pass the test.
The post office — the government printing office — Amtrak — Fannie and Freddie were all built for a different time in our country. When the private sector did not adequately provide those services. That’s no longer the case.
Yeah, sure, FedEx, UPS et al will deliver packages nationwide, but a quick Google of "postal service" comes up empty for private sector alternatives. (Yes, the federal government maintains a legal monopoly on mail delivery, but if there are provisos to the Google Test, Pawlenty should've mentioned them.) As for Amtrak, passenger rail service hasn't been truly profitable virtually anywhere for almost a century, and the only private rail service I could find on the Internet is a tourist excursion that hooks up classic rail cars to Amtrak trains.
Fannie and Freddie, like most banks, were federally chartered private corporations, not government agencies, so the Google Test doesn't apply there either, but I'll give Pawlenty the Government Printing Office. There are plenty of Kinkos. Though there were also plenty of private sector printers back in 1861 when the GPO first opened, so Pawlenty's schtick about it being "a different time" doesn't really apply.
In fact, the only positive thing I can say about Pawlenty's ill-conceived Google Test is that it's not quite as stupid as Herman Cain's "I am only going to allow small bills — three pages" tribute to America's growing epidemic of Attention Deficit Disorder. But then, that's not saying much.
