More likely, the Republicans will extract some sort of Pyrrhic concession that delays but does not stop ACA, continuing their skip with the Democrats down the yellow brick road to an Oz that looks a lot like Detroit. If they hold firm, the punditry has proclaimed they will be playing with fire, but it may well be the Democrats who are in incendiary danger. The Republicans are not trying to shut down the government; they are trying to stop a looming train wreck. They have sent bills to the Senate that would fund the rest of the government, which the Senate has rejected and which Obama would have vetoed if it had not. So who is shutting down the government?

There is a larger danger to the Democrats than being blamed for the shutdown. In the Democrat’s weird world view, the country needs the government and would not survive a minute without it. The sky was going to fall with the sequester, except it did not. Undoubtedly there are many beneficiaries of government spending (the majority of which are Democrats) for whom a shutdown will make life more difficult. But who needs whom? For the first 137 years of this country’s existence it thrived, certainly in comparison to today’s pathetic economy, with a government that was minuscule by today’s standards, and had no income tax or central bank to fund itself. If a shutdown were to last any length of time, it might become obvious to all what many productive, privately employed citizens already know: the government needs them; except for the military, the courts, and the police (a small percentage of government spending), they do not need the government. If the resources the government steals from its vassals were returned to them and it got out of the way, the most innovative, productive, and charitable people on the planet would do almost everything better than the government can, including providing adequate medical care for all. What gives statists night sweats is the fear that the vassals may someday realize that.

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