David Thomas: “I have a couple of things I wanted to visit about this morning. The first one of the priorities that I and a number of…”

“I have a couple of things I wanted to visit about this morning. The first one of the priorities that I and a number of people have for the 105th Congress is S. 314, the Freedom From Government Competition Act. This is an effort, along with many other things, to seek to reduce the size of the central Government, which most people agree we should do. It is one of the reasons we try to have a balanced budget amendment, so that we can control the size of the growth of the Federal Government by our willingness to pay for it. One of the other areas, of course, that we have been very interested in, and continue to be, is the idea of 'devolution'--kind of a new word. It means move some of the functions down to State and local governments so that we do, in keeping with the Founding Fathers, keep the size of central Government relatively limited and do those things that are essential to be done on the national level, and there are many, and yet not do the things that could better be done either at the local level in government or, indeed, in the private sector. The private sector is what I want to talk about a little today. In general, from the title, we are simply saying that we want to remove the competition of the Federal Government in those things that could as well or, indeed, better be done in the private sector. So S. 314 is called the Freedom From Government Competition Act.”