ROOT: Bin Laden is dead, Uncle Sam is slow

OPINION:

Like the rest of America, I cheered at the news of the killing of Osama bin Laden. I was thrilled. It made my night. And the next day, too. One of the great vile, evil villains of modern history had been eliminated. If you weren’t celebrating, there is a chip missing from your DNA.

But don’t fall for the trap. Don’t be distracted and forget the truth about government. As Ronald Reagan once said, “Government is not a solution to our problem, government is the problem.” Government fails miserably at virtually everything it does, year after year, day after day, hour after hour. Government is brutal. Government violates our rights. Government steals your money and property. Government steals your liberty. Government tries its best to control your thinking and your life. Government wastes billions every day, trillions over time.

But most of all, government loves to use sleight of hand to distract you. It manages to do one thing right and then tries to use it to make us forget all the incompetence and the misery it has inflicted on us. Sorry, but occasionally, even a blind squirrel finds an acorn. Should one successful accomplishment make the citizens forget the multitude of failures, theft and rights violations of government? This commentary is just a reminder to my fellow Americans to not let them fool you or distract you. Government at its best is merely a necessary evil and that hasn’t changed.

Often even when government succeeds, it manages to fail miserably. Exhibit A is the killing of Osama bin Laden. God bless Navy SEAL Team 6. They have my eternal thanks for keeping my four children safe at night. They carried out a successful plan by executing bin Laden. But don’t let that good point distract you from the failures of government. It took the U.S. government 10 years, two gigantic wars, and more than $1 trillion to find one 6-foot-4-inch Muslim terrorist with kidney problems, whose face was known by every human being in the world, hiding in plain sight in the middle of a country supposedly run by our allies. Do we really think congratulations are in order?

Yes, the final episode of this soap opera gets an A-plus for showing bin Laden what “New York Attitude” is all about. He now sleeps with the fishes. The final episode of “Who Shot Osama?” may have gotten record ratings and applause, but the long-running TV series should have been canceled a decade ago. This entire episode proves government is an incompetent, inefficient, dismal flop. If Uncle Sam were a CEO, the shareholders would have fired him nine years and a few hundred billion dollars ago over this embarrassment. Then they would have sued him for fraud and incompetence, and demanded all his salary back for ruining and bankrupting a perfectly good company.

You know what this whole episode really proves? It would be smart to privatize as much of the government as possible, so it stops wasting our taxpayer money. If we had outsourced the job of finding and killing bin Laden to Ross Perot, Donald Trump, Bill Gates or Richard Branson, allowed them to put together their own private team of bounty hunters, and offered them $250,000,000 as a reward, they would have gotten the job done in a week or two. And the U.S. taxpayers would have saved hundreds of billions.

Bin Laden would have been dispatched back in 1998, after the U.S. Embassy bombings, or in 2000, after the USS Cole bombing. Sept. 11, 2001, would never have happened in the first place. Instead, we wasted 10 years, trillions of dollars and thousands of lives of American soldiers on two costly wars and one decade-long, incompetent search for bin Laden - all after the fact of Sept. 11. Government is slow and incompetent, always reacting late, always one step behind.

And how about the CIA? They are taking a victory lap after bin Laden’s death. Why? Our brilliant government listened to the CIA tell us that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and bin Laden had kidney disease. It turns out there were no WMDs and the terror chief had no kidney disease. Actually, he had three young wives and a prescription for the Muslim version of Viagra. Great job, CIA. If the CIA were a contestant on Celebrity Apprentice, Donald Trump would say, “You’re fired.”

Wayne Allyn Root is a former Libertarian vice-presidential nominee and author of “The Conscience of a Libertarian: Empowering the Citizen Revolution with God, Guns, Gold, Gambling & Tax Cuts” (Wiley, 2009). He writes at RootforAmerica.com.