A Contrarian Dialogue |
Eber Views |
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A Most Egregious Pronouncement Cocksure Public Spenders |
Dec 10, 1994
Cocksure Public Spenders Of the lessons to be learned from Mr Citron's "colossal overreach in municipal finance" (The Turbocharged Treasurer, Dec 9, 1994), the most important of these was missed. Huge reserves of public money in the hands of any public servant, egotism aside, is only necessary because of the immensity of government itself. While it is clear that many municipalities are under great pressure to provide for more services with revenue sources restricted by the likes of Proposition 13, and while this demand has the dangerous potential of offering hero status to any official that can creatively produce additional spending money at no cost to the taxpayer, any way we look at this, the public would be better served, both federally and locally, by governments that didn't have control over or a need for so much of our money. The public will be better off when it decides that it needs much less service from inefficient government (pardon the redundancy). This would simultaneously result in having much less of its money at risk in the hands of "cocksure" and "reckless" fiduciaries like Mr. Citron. Though people may, in the words of Robert Frum, "rather like government" today, events like this will continue to help make the case for cutting it down tomorrow.
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