That’s Ron Swanson. His goal, at least in season 1, was to shrink the government from the inside, like a libertarian mole. It’s a bit different.
Jeff Vader?
Holding the job is the individual gesture that I meant.
That’s even funnier than all the times I’ve heard people with non-value-added jobs in companies dependent on Cold-War-relic military contracts complain about all those people on welfare. 
Just poking a bit of fun. The suggestion I made (noted above) was for the reason you mention here: a huge amount of equipment waste in embassy facilities because nobody thought to require parts breakdowns to come with the kitchen appliances purchased under contract. So if some part failed, and you couldn’t identify it to order a new one, the machine became warehoused until all its usable parts were taken, and a new machine ordered to replace it. Bad washer timer? New washer! Broken fridge thermostat? New fridge! The waste was enormous.
It’s not necessarily hypocritical to work for the government, even in a capacity that you think the government shouldn’t be paying for, if you’re a libertarian.
For example, a libertarian who wanted to teach elementary school but thought that the government shouldn’t be providing education could still reasonably get a job at a public school. After all, that’s who’s hiring lots of elementary school teachers. He could still advocate against public education funding without being a hypocrite.
However, once they start actually cutting public education funding, it does make him a hypocrite to protest that.
It’s not the working for the government that the OP was pissed about, it’s the fact that they are complaining about being furloughed as a direct result of voting for the tea party people who pushed for such things.
This may all sound very logical to, well, logical people. But a huge percentage of Libertarians and other genres of right-wing [del]idiots [checks forum][/del] philosophers make exactly the opposite argument when it suits them.
Buffett thinks his tax rate should be higher? He should pay the higher tax voluntarily.
Schmidt thinks only non-carbon cars should be permitted? He should never drive such a car, outlawed or not.
AL Manager Jones opposes the Designated Hitter Rule? He should make his own pitcher bat.
Joe the Teacher complains that education shouldn’t be tax-financed? Oh yeah, I’m going to suck on the socialist teat myself! :smack:
I wish I knew the specific name for this fallacy, becoming more and more prevalent even at this relatively sentient message board.
Except, opposing profligate spending is not just a Libertarian stance. Seriously, have you encountered anyone who actually advocates for wasteful government spending? There are probably some lobbyists, congressmen, and contractors who are all for spending government money on advantageous projects, and there is inevitably some money wasted, just like there’s money wasted in family budgets and small businesses. But the idea that Libertarians are the only ones who care about responsible budgeting is just silly.
In my experience the biggest waste in government spending has been in the defense sector, and area most of the right loves. I’m not against defense spending at all - just inefficient defense spending. Note how the Republicans wailed and moaned about the DOD cuts.
I’ve also been in private industry (big companies) for 33 years, and there is plenty of waste here also. Nothing is friction free.
The difference here is that if a company wastes enough money for a long enough time, they go out of business. The government, in the same situation, simply raises taxes and goes on.
That’s why it’s not hypocritical, but just downright stupid. I have a friend that lives in Texas and works as a teacher. He voted conservative. Some time after the elections, he started complaining to me that they were going to start cutting the budget at his school and he was at risk for losing his job. I said, “you voted for them” and he knew what I meant.
He’s like that with a lot of things. You can show him facts, but if he doesn’t “believe” in it, than those mean nothing. Did I mention he’s religious? I think that might have a thing or two to do with it. Some people are just stubborn.
Ooh! I can generalize too!
If a government agency wastes enough money for a long time, they get downsized by politicians. The private sector can raise prices, call it unavoidable inflation, and go on.
Seriously, the assumptions some people have, even now, about government spending!
Cite?
Back when everyone and their mother was marching on Madison because Scott Walker was planning to bust the public worker’s union (though most of the protesters were students only really only seemed to be concerned about the teachers), something that seemed to be lost on most of them was that Walker said that if he didn’t bust the unions he was going to layoff 1500 public workers. My politics not withstanding, I always wanted to go up to one of the protesters and ask them “Why are you marching on Madison?” knowing full well what their answer would be and then say “Do you know what’s going to happen if you ‘win’?”. I don’t think many of them understood that if the teachers got their collective bargaining back they ran the risk of losing their job altogether.
It’s a little weird for libertarians to take a job with the government but if you work for the government long enough you will see so much waste that you might well become a libertarian.
Possibly they didn’t believe him and thought it a bluff? :rolleyes: Also, I see your “protesters *** only seemed to be concerned about the teachers” and raise with the fact that Walker wasn’t busting “the” public employees’ union but exempted police and firefighters. Why? Who knows?! Because they tend to vote Republican more than other public employees? Because [del]one of the Koch Brothers[/del] someone reminded him of the historical lessons from ex-dictators who fiddled with the army’s pay and benefits? 
Do they froth about umbrellas?
This genuinely depends on who you’re talking about and where your experiences with them come from.
Some libertarians are anarcho-capitalists in everything but name. Privatize the police, end all public spending, disband the military and rely on county-level (posse comitatus) volunteer militias for defense, and everyone makes their own private currency. They’re still pleased to call themselves libertarians.
Others are paleoconservatives who want to go back to the era before FDR. They’re happy to have a do-nothing Federal government, a military that is equivalent to what we had prior to WWII, and to rely on the states to do everything from OSHA to civil rights enforcement and everything else. Goldbuggery begins about here on the scale, as does opposition to the Federal Reserve. They claim to want to preserve the Constitution, but they don’t really want to see the Supreme Court overturning any laws; the fact this would de facto mean the repeal of a lot of the First Amendment is apparently OK by them. Ron Paul has snapped up a lot of these people.
Others are about how I was circa 2000 or so: They don’t really want to dismantle the government, or destroy our economy by chasing gold, or do anything really revolutionary, but they believe more local control would be good and are willing to vote for either party, at least in theory. In my experience, they’re GOP voters who don’t quite realize the GOP is far more interested in Big Business and the Religious Right than anything to do with shrinking the overall size of government.
I know there are groups I’ve missed, including the small but vocal racist and anti-Semitic fringe currently centered around Alex Jones, but I think those hit the high points.
Having worked at a VA hospital (as a resident doc) I would say that this is actually true. VAs take better care of the veterans now than they used to (the VA is certainly better than the county hospital at least), but the layers of bureaucracy and inefficiency are pretty obvious if you spend any time there. I didn’t work as quickly or see as many patients there as I did at private hospitals.
I would argue that nowadays a lot of people work for corporations that go against their values in some ways, actually. Many liberals don’t approve of the behavior of large corporations, but yet plenty of liberals work for one.