Democrats lose sequester battle: Column

Glenn Harlan Reynolds | USATODAY

The whole sequestration gambit has failed, to the point where even the Washington Post's Ezra Klein admits that "the Democrats have lost on sequestration." The idea was that even the comparatively minor cuts in spending caused by the sequester would be so painful that voters would demand higher taxes rather than endure cuts in spending.

Problem was, when the spending cuts came, nobody noticed. This led the Obama administration to try to up the pain by focusing cuts in places where people might feel the pain: canceling White House tours for schoolchildren, or furloughing air traffic controllers.

That didn't work either. The tour-canceling just looked mean, and the problem with targeting air travel is that members of Congress, and their top donors, fly a lot. Huge bipartisan majorities in Congress thus quickly passed legislation forcing the FAA to make cuts elsewhere instead.

The whole thing was a bust, and has me thinking that someone in Congress -- or, if he's smart, President Obama -- ought to propose more across-the-board cuts as a means of addressing our swollen deficit and national debt. Critics of across-the-board cuts always say that we should make "smart cuts" instead of using a "meat axe." But the reason why we have a ballooning national debt is that our politicians are clearly incapable of making "smart cuts."

When my own state, Tennessee, was facing budget difficulties a few years ago, our then-governor Phil Bredesen, a Democrat, ordered across-the-board cuts. Nobody liked it, but it brought things under control. Many other states have responded to budget difficulties in similar fashion. So why not try more of it at the national level?

But there's another lesson in the FAA furlough fiasco: Whatever politicians control, they will use against you to get what they want. The furloughs weren't a reasoned effort to save money: They were an attempt to punish voters for not approving tax increases. If the politicians could have shut down ESPN and blamed insufficient revenue, they would have done that, too.

But they don't control ESPN. And, really, there's no reason why they should control the air traffic control system, either. Why not privatize it?

The idea of privatizing air traffic control has been around for decades. Other countries, including Canada, have done it. Their systems are generally regarded as well-run and efficient, which should come as no surprise. There's no particular reason why you need government employees to tell planes not to run into each other.

But while efficiency and cost-saving are good ideas, they're not the most important part. If the FAA's air traffic control operation had been privatized, then bureaucrats out to punish voters wouldn't have been able to abuse their power to do so. Privatizing air traffic control wouldn't just save money in the narrow sense, it would also remove one arrow from the political class's quiver.

To the political class, whatever the rhetoric, government programs aren't tools for improving the country. They're tools for acquiring the main goal of the political class: more power, which leads to more patronage, more graft (legal and otherwise) and a boost to their all-encompassing sense of self-importance.

The abuse of federal power over air traffic control is just another example of this problem. The best response to such abuse is to punish them by privatizing air traffic control so that they can't do it again. That it will also produce better service at lower cost is just a bonus.

Glenn Harlan Reynolds is professor of law at the University of Tennessee. He blogs at InstaPundit.com.

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