Final Comments on the Shutdown

Presumably Donald Trump would not have gone on national television proclaiming his responsibility for a government shutdown if he had recognized how unpopular it would be.  Nor would Republicans have shut down the government all the other times they have done so (and, at times, led chants of "Shut 'er down!" if they had recognized how unpopular it would be).

The reason for this should be obvious.  Economic royalists, being opposed to all government on principle, simply want to destroy it without recognizing its importance.  They simply assume that all government is bad and should be destroyed.  Orderly dismantling is best, of course, but wrecking through corruption and incompetence is still preferable to allowing the existing system to continue.  And if wrecking through corruption and incompetence doesn't do the job, why not shut it down to speed things up.  Many are openly saying so.  If the prospect of frequent work without pay discourages the best and the brightest from government work, so much the better.  The worse the quality of government employees, the less popular government will be and the more pressure to shrink it.  If keeping parks open but unstaffed causes damage to the ecosystem, so much the better.  Destruction of the ecosystem will end all rationale for the park and justify auctioning it off to the highest bidder.  And so forth.

The shutdown should prove once and for all that, even if you want to massively shrink government, simple wrecking is no substitute for careful planning and orderly dismantling.  Thoughtful libertarian Megan McArdle painstakingly explained this during the last shutdown/debt ceiling crisis:

We could certainly do less, and I agree that we should. But we cannot do it instantly. It is not politically possible, and it is not even fiscally possible. It would, for example, be eminently possible to have a private air-traffic control system. But we cannot privatize the system by August 3rd [two weeks from the date she was writing].

And as for just firing all the air traffic controllers and trusting in the free market to find something better to take their place -- well, good luck surviving the mob reaction that would follow.

The same applies to regulatory agencies.  I get that economic royalist don't believe that these should exist.  But as the law presently stands, companies are still required to apply to these agencies for permits to do various things.  Shutting down the agencies does not end the permit requirement; it just prevents anyone from getting a permit.  Shutting down the agency is no substitute from repealing the actual law requiring a permit.

Finally, I will note that this funding goes for three weeks.  Donald Trump expects there to be an acceptable bill in that amount of time.  There won't.  Trump may very well think he won this standoff and be prepared to do another shutdown at that time.  My guess, though, is that cooler heads, in the form of Republican members of Congress, will prevail.  One of them recently tweeting that if negotiations do not yield a wall, executive action remained a possibility.  Conspicuous here is what did not remain a possibility.