Sen. Mike Lee says congressional policy reformers should have the courage to kill dysfunctional New Deal-era programs, such as the Export-Import Bank, that have outlived their usefulness.
Writes Lee in a Christian Post op-ed:
[W]hile most government programs are conceived by politicians trying to solve a problem, they are immortalized by bureaucratic inertia and special-interest clients who have grown comfortable with, or dependent upon, the patronage of the state.
All too often, this is how government works. But it doesn’t have to be this way.
Just look at the Export-Import Bank, which is even older than the USDA crop control program, though it is just as dysfunctional and unfair.
Having outlived its purpose decades ago, the Bank has been propped up by the coterie of political and economic insiders who benefit from its largesse, while tilting the playing field against everyone else. Ex-Im apologists insist its operations are critical for supporting U.S. exports – a fiction that can be maintained only by ignoring the opportunities within our global capital markets and disregarding those exporters that are not powerful enough, wealthy enough, or well-connected enough to find themselves in the Bank’s good graces.
