Asteroid strikes, flu plague, and economic meltdown.

According to CNN, that is what we should fear from this “government shutdown.”

People have to hype it up in order to give the impression that the government matters.

In reality, this just reveals why we shouldn’t trust the government to do anything essential in our lives.

If political fights in DC can put people at that kind of risk, then we should get these services from organizations that have incentives to deliver.

Congressmen won’t lose their jobs over this, except in the unlikely event the voters from their district fire them. More likely they will blame representatives from other districts.

But without Congress luring us into a false sense of security, other organizations would fill the gap.

For instance, who might have an incentive to make sure a public outbreak of the flu doesn’t become epidemic? I would bet health insurance companies would be interested in saving costs by monitoring the flu’s progression. They would save money purchasing services from an agency that monitors and sells disease data.

As for the economic meltdown, this is another iteration of the broken window fallacy. This is the incorrect idea that the economy is stimulated by a broken window due to the money spent replacing the window. But since resources are limited, the truth is that a window will be made instead of something else. So whoever has to buy the new window will have to spend less on, say, going out to dinner.

And the same holds true for non-essential government services. It’s right there: non-essential. These things are not necessary but have become a mundane recipient of bloated government funding.

It is painful in the short term because now you have hundreds of thousands of people without a paycheck. But if the government never hired them in the first place, and didn’t take that money from the taxpayers, then those people would have to work in the productive sector. Their jobs would be based on demand, not whatever Congress thinks is a good idea.

And some of their jobs may still exist if they were moved to the private sector. You can bet they wouldn’t be randomly furloughed when management couldn’t reach an agreement. Companies need to be profitable, or heads roll.

Don’t Worry, Security Services Will Go on Operating

We need the government to keep us safe from asteroids, disease, and poverty. But their services apparently hang by a thread, with one argument over funding plunging the USA into turmoil.

Speaking of this false sense of security, workers for the CIA, FBI, and Homeland Security will still show up to work. Their prowess and determination to keep us safe is unrivaled.

Except perhaps the competency of these agencies is rivaled by a pissed off 15-year-old boy.

Now 18, the British teenager will be sentenced for hacking into former CIA Director John Brennan’s email and gaining access to CIA passwords and files. He obtained contact lists as well as sensitive information about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Former Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson was also hacked.

He also targeted the ex-deputy director of the FBI Mark Giuliano and James Clapper, director of national intelligence under Obama, as well as their families.

He boasted about carrying out “the best breach ever” after accessing an FBI database to get the names of 1,000 staff and details of the officer responsible for the notorious shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri.

The information Gamble gathered was later used to carry out a “swatting” attack on John Holdren, a science and technology adviser to US President Barack Obama, resulting in armed officers being sent to Mr Holdren’s family home.

So basically one teenager using the computer in his bedroom was a match for the top security officials in the United States government. And they are supposed to win wars, thwart terrorism, and stop crime.

We need to shut down more of the government.