Letters to the Editor

Letter: Why I don’t care about the shutdown

A lot of fear is being raised about the consequences of the government shutdown. However, those paying attention may have noticed a lot of those fears are propagated by government itself — hardly a unbiased source of information on the matter.

So imagine what would happen tomorrow if you woke up and there was no governments at all. Would traffic stop and bakeries no longer bake bread? Would Walmart close and the utilities shut off?

You may ask about TSA workers or air traffic controllers — they will stop getting paid and all of the air traffic will eventually stop.

Well, not necessarily. Airlines do not use TSA because TSA won the bidding contest but because government gives them no other choice. Airlines have billions of dollars riding on the safety of air travel, and blown-up airplanes are not good for business. Without government interference, private security would spawn before too long and air traffic controllers would start getting paychecks from the airlines.

You may wonder: What about if central government bank stops printing our money altogether? No money to buy anything!

Well, it isn’t that hard to print money; it’s just paper. All that Alaskans would need to do is to print cute pink-colored salmon dollar notes, with an exchange rate one-for-one for all your U.S. notes you have in Alaska banks. Life would go on — but now without the Fed’s interest rates and inflation. Problem solved.

Our federal government was given our Bill of Rights and powers to preserve our freedoms and liberty to pursue our happiness. Everything else, people can do.

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So what is the real danger if there is a government shutdown lasting years? We could find out that “non-essential workers” is pretty much all of them.

— Vlastic Marek

Palmer

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