I’m not sure when the trend started, but at some point in the arc of pop culture, T-shirts began to emerge with the message: “I went to [insert name of place], and all I got was this stupid T-shirt.” This sprung a number of variations on the theme: “I went there, did that, but all I got was this.”
We could conjure up a long list as it applies to the headline. All I got was more debt service than we spend on national defense, for example. We could instead say increased poverty, homelessness, drug addiction and overdoses, crime, higher energy, health care, and food prices. The replacement agenda! We even got our health freedoms taken away, along with our right to assembly, to faith, self-defense, and free speech. Thanks to the recent federal elections, these works in progress are suspended (we hope), but Satan Claus is out there, Jimmy, and he wants to spend us into self-destruction while taking away our right to question it.
All I Got Was…
We have less than nothing to show for all that spending. Nothing good. It is one of several reasons why Democrats were less successful than they’d hoped. Not to worry, tyranny never rests. They will return with fury and do whatever it takes to get us back on the path. While we wait, the question remains: how do we get our toes off this ledge?
Massive, unrepentant free market capitalism. Take the bureaucrat’s regulatory boot off the necks of job creators and let them loose. Incentivize free market growth. Focus on policies that encourage competition, innovation, and productivity, from energy to widgets to everything.
People will step up and do the work without needing a public servant’s salary or the public burden that comes with it. Growth is the only way out. As Joe Rogan and Mark Andreessen discussed just a few days ago, it is the only way to fund any or all of the social programs the people putting us in debt claim so desperately to want. If you have massive growth, you also end up with resources that can be directed not to new layers of bureaucracy but to real issues at street level.
The other fun fact about a growth strategy is that it reduces the need for funding social programs, which ought to be privately run by non-NGO charities.NGOs are not NGOs; they are typically government-funded operations (GOs) laundering money to favored interests. If you doubt me, let’s take another look at the national debt T-shirt. Billions have been funneled to these groups, and almost everyone agrees that life in America has worsened.
Finally, and this is a touchy subject whose time may finally have come. Public schools are the single most significant waste of money at the local level, backstopped by federal meddling. Towns need to take a serious look at making T-shirts to wear to school board meetings. We Spent 20,000 per student per year [or for whatever your local act of fiscal rape amounts], and all I got was kids who can’t read or do math.
That’d be fun.
