Tenth Amendment Center: Card Game Teaches About Federal Waste and Abuse
If a vote was held in your town or city to build a single bus stop that cost $1,000,000 – do you think you or your neighbors would oppose it? If you found out your county had spent $80,000 torturing lab mice until they developed speech impediments, would you be writing angry letters to your local newspaper demanding answers? Do you think there would be a massive effort to stop the waste?
Of course!
That is the beauty of local government – you have a voice that simply can’t be ignored.
Conversely, that is the problem with federal government. It operates with virtually no accountability. Both of the projects I mentioned above were actually funded by the federal government, and those are just the beginning.
Our federal tax money has been spent in all kinds of patently absurd ways – from paying $9,600,000 for medical bills for people who are long dead, to spending $869,000,000 between 1996 and 2007 on storing surplus peanuts.
Every year think tanks, political action committees and a handful of liberty loving politicians will release dozens of reports detailing all kinds of insane (and in some cases hilarious) wasteful government spending. It will come to you as no surprise that these reports, with their pie charts, line graphs and massive bibliographies, fail to reach your average Joe. The result is obvious: despite a plethora of evidence to the contrary, people continue to believe that the federal government is a fair and just arbiter of limited resources.
That is why I invented Pork Barrel – a fun and hilarious card game that exposes all of the fraud and wast in the U.S. government.
You’ve probably played Cards Against Humanity, so think of Pork Barrel as Cards Against Big Government. Pork Barrel attacks government waste, fraud, abuse, corruption and incompetence with carefully sourced facts in a consumable and fun format. For too long, liberty lovers and constitution enthusiasts have relied on the works of timeless constitutional philosophers to spread our message – but while we’re begging people to read books, an entire generation is being hoodwinked by late night TV comics into believing that even the most local problem is a national crisis.
In the marketplace of ideas, political opinions are bought and sold not by political philosophers, but by every form of media we consume every day. Comedians, reality TV stars, even the subtle undertones of video games all can persuade people to think one way or another. We need to insert our pitch into these mediums. Exposing the fraud and incompetence of government is a central and eye catching component of that pitch. Perfectly honest and respectable people will probably always stand by the federal government as long at the believe that their tax money is being well spent and allocated – but the more they know about $1,000,000 bus stops, $80,000 lab rat speech therapies and $9,600,000 health bills for dead people, the more questions they will ask – and that is the first step.
You can get Pork Barrel today at www.playporkbarrel.com/.
Preston Chaffee
May 27, 2017 at 12:18PM
