Pork Jerky, Alaska-style Glenn Reynolds, N.Z. Bear and the rest of the pork-busting blogosphere are doing a fabulous job shedding light on all the dripping fat in Washington. I think Alaska GOP Rep. Don Young deserves a targeted blog…

I was talking to Shark last night about my recent purchase of some George Dickel whiskey. The subject of taxes came up. We discussed Hoey Robbins� post of a few weeks ago in which he told us all how much

Paperwight’s Fair Shot is pleased to announce that it has decided that the first Ned Beatty Award for Best Impression of a Porker goes to [the envelope, please] Republican Don Young, the sole House Member from Alaska.

I never thought I’d say this, but I miss Gingrich.

I heard it called Stingy today because it doesn’t fund high-speed rail transit between Peoria and Springfield, Illinois.

Stingy!

Those heartless Republicans!

Radley Balko’s on top of recent pigs feeding at the trough here and here.

It seems to me that the main reason this problem arises is because Federal tax and spend policies have jumped monstrously out of control so that there’s a huge pot of money which everyone figures will be wasted by someone else if they don’t get their hands on it first.

Would people be this happy if taxes were wasted by state authorities? I can imagine that some wouldn’t care, but I think the closer you get to home, and the more it seems like your own money being wasted, the more you care.

So, from a libertarian perspective, wouldn’t it be most sensible to have much lower Federal taxes which fund only those projects critical to the nation as a whole? State authorities could then set taxes according to the prevailing ideological balance of the people in that state, and organise welfare/infrastructure/etc. payments accordingly. I realise that Federal expenditure also has a wealth redistributive effect, and that cancelling that immediately would cause a lot of instability, but if it were phased out of a period of time people would have time to get more used to migrating where the work was.

What would the drawbacks be? I can’t see that many from the angle i’m looking.

Problem is, how do we do that without getting someone else who will perpetuate the problem — if only by supporting their party’s national agenda, whether or not they send home this kind of pork?