Looking at Twitter today, I saw that the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) is actually on Twitter. And I guess I knew that already, except that I really got to thinking about the intricacies of that association this morning while figuring out how to best help people at the local, individual level with their endeavors to produce and sell local food.
Because, see, whoever is tweeting for the U.S. Department of Defense is getting paid to tweet. And I would almost rather have them working on defending the American people versus attempting to win a popularity contest on Twitter. Now, call me old-school, but for these “public officials” who are serving as “public servants” –would it not behoove us more to have our taxpayer money spent to defend us, not to tweet at us?
And what about the atrocious intrusion of privacy that has been approved by Congress and engaged in by the Department of Homeland Security, the National Security Agency, (et al.)? They can already monitor every tweet, every phone call, every email. Isn’t it strange that they also are using your taxpayer money to pay for someone to manage a Twitter account?And at the post office the other day, I saw some strange promotion for “The Biggest Loser” television program that I guess the U.S. Postal Service was sponsoring or advertising for. Awesome. Nothing like having your government hard at work to promote a television program. How is that really benefiting us? Sure, it is cute, but is that really the government's role?
I think we, as the American people, are the biggest losers from boondoggle spending by the federal government. State and local governments are more capable of partnering with private businesses if they so deem it to be a good idea, but the federal government doing such things is inefficient and a complete waste, not to mention, illustrative of a severe break from the duties outlined in the Constitution.
So while we work at a local level to help small businesses figure out how to open for business, we can muse about fiscal policy and what we would do with just a little bit more of our own money, that could have probably been used more efficiently by ourselves, in our own lives (versus giving it to the federal government), and we would live another day without a tweet from the Department of Defense, and we could still go to the post office, even without "The Biggest Loser" promotion. Just as a reminder – people in government work for you.