I Say Do Not Replace Sebelius

     With last week's resignation of Kathleen "Billion Dollar Website" Sebelius as Secretary of Health and Human Services, the question is left severely begging, "Why replace her with anyone?" No one can make the argument that her position in the government would yield any worse results for the American people if it were just to be left empty. In fact, it was Jeane Kirkpatrick that said the "family is the original departments of health, education, and welfare." And therein lies the answer to this faltering, spinning into a degenerative oblivion country that had been the beacon of freedom, prosperity, and the rectitude of a family-centric culture compared to the oppressive disillusionment that is a government-centric one.
     When George Washington became our nation's first president, he appointed three cabinet positions at the level of Secretary. There was a Secretary of State, Secretary of the Treasury, and Secretary of war. These three positions, along with the Attorney General, comprised the president's entire cabinet. The current president's cabinet is occupied by almost two dozen advisors, fourteen of them holding positions at the level of Secretary. Each one of those Secretaries presides over their own little theifdoms called departments, each with tens or even hundreds of billions of dollars flowing into their budgets every year.
     Now some may make the argument that we have become a larger country and more diverse economy compared to the waning days of the 18th century when General Washington became our first executive. That is true, however, when the money flowing into these departments is spent mostly on union benefits for government workers, and the administration of the departments themselves, the wheels have most definitely fallen off the wagon of State. The department of education, for example, spends over 100 billion taxpayer dollars each year, and not one dime goes to hiring teachers, buying books, or anything else related to education. The dollars are sucked into the giant, gaping chasm of government bureaucracy like dirt into a shop vac.
     President Obama once said he wanted to cut the budget with a scalpel, not an ax. But the budget, which has grown to four trillion dollars, needs to be slashed with a chain saw to make any meaningful progress towards fiscal probity. Whole departments should be eliminated, beginning with the Department of Education, which has only consolidated union power and influence over our children and has lead to deterioration, not elevation, in the way in which our nation's schools educate our young. The Departments of Commerce and Agriculture are two others whose only purpose seems to be to dole out tax payer dollars in low interest government loans to victim groups for the former, and to an ever increasing base of food stamp recipients for the latter. What either of those activities have to do with commerce or agriculture is beyond the reasonable mind.
     Ronald Reagan once said that the closest thing we have to eternal life on this planet is a government program. And the cabinet-level departments in the federal government have grown into grotesque and bloated creatures whose only purpose is to push a politically correct agenda, and to feed its rapacious appetite for an ever larger pile of hard earned tax payer dollars. If the insanity of cabinet-level positions like Secretary of the Interior or Secretary of Labor are not reigned in, I fully expect that at some point in the not to distant future we will have a Secretary of Secretary, the ultimate in Orwellian big government double speak.