My goal today was to find a column honestly advocating for the impending government shutdown, scheduled to begin at midnight October 1. By “honestly,” I mean the piece needed to justify the current Freedom Caucus rigor over obscene deficits in the context of their silence over the Trump administration’s obscene deficits pre-COVID. I don’t normally apply pre-conditions to posting columns, but this one seemed fair. It also seemed like an obvious point one concerned about the national debt might wish to address.

And yet, nothing. That’s not to say there isn’t a strong column out there arguing for the shutdown. It’s just to say I couldn’t find it. What I found instead was piece after piece from the left, right, and center arguing against the maneuver, so I’ve posted the best one of those. The author isn’t a Keynesian thrilled about the level of government spending. As far as I can tell, he’s a conservative genuinely worried about it. And being genuinely worried means working real solutions. To the author, a government shutdown doesn’t qualify. Not even remotely. It’s hard to read his column, packed full of stats and figures, and disagree.