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Opening Arguments

Google it and say goodbye

Tim Pawlenty's Google Test for government:

We can start by applying what I call “The Google Test.”

If you can find a good or service on the Internet, then the federal government probably doesn't need to be doing it.

The post office — the government printing office — Amtrak — Fannie and Freddie were all built for a different time in our country.  When the private sector did not adequately provide those services. That's no longer the case.

The folks at reason.com, where libertarianism reigns, say by that standard, "the government could conceivably skip out on just about every service it currently officers," but cast doubts on how serious Pawlenty really is about it.

It's not at all clear how many government services he'd really like to cut: Later in the speech, he estimates that, properly applied to all federal agencies, the Google test could save “up to 20 percent in many programs”—a carefully hedged figure (“many programs” could refer to the majority of the federal government's operations or just a few dozen departments and projects in a handful of agencies) that reveals very little about how much Pawlenty really wants to scale back federal operations.

Pawlenty's own record suggests he may have trouble applying the Google test. He's previously failed to follow it on at least one of the examples he explicitly mentioned in the speech—government-sponsored mortgage giants Fannie and Freddie.

Might this be a case of letting the good be held hostage by the perfect? Once a government program begins, it's awfully hard to get rid of it and tempting to find ways to justify it, even for a small-government guy like Pawlenty. Even if he hasn't completely lived up to his own idealism (how many of us do?), that doesn't make the ideal wrong. The Google Test is a useful exercise in

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