Pork Barrel: A Card Game Exposing Gov’t Spending

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By Preston Chaffee

But Without the Government Who Will…

You’ve heard it. I’ve heard it. We’ve all heard it. That nagging questions that liberty lovers just can’t seem to shake: “but without the government who will build the roads.”

We have of course responded with some pretty hilarious memes – but the frequency of this quasi defense reveals a disturbing trend among American citizens – they honestly have no idea where their tax money goes. The Feds collected $3.27 trillion dollars in 2016, enough to build 1.6 million miles of road, but just 13,788 miles of road were paved – so where did all that money go? Well, first we had to spend $80,000 torturing mice until they developed speech impediments. Then there was that janitor in San Francisco who makes $270,000 per year by signing up for overtime and then sleeping in a broom closet during that overtime – he’s gotta get paid too. Then of course, 200 people who had been dead for the entire year racked up $9,600,000 in medical bills. These facts being readily at hand, your response to the above question might be “but without government, who will make the mice stutter?”

Now, you’d think that when someone is taking twenty of thirty percent of what you make, that you’d want to know that it was being spent reasonably, wisely and in a way that might in some tangential way make your life better – but you’d be wrong. 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. That’s why I invented Pork Barrel.

Pork Barrel is the world’s first libertarian card game – it attacks government waste, fraud, abuse, corruption and incompetence with carefully sourced facts in a consumable and fun format. Too often we rely on the timeless works of libertarian scholars like Ayn Rand or F.A. Hayek to indoctrinate and persuade – but Atlas Shrugged is 561,996 words long – who’s got time for that?  While we’re begging people to read Mises or Bastiat, a generation is being hoodwinked into socialism by late night TV comics. These edutainers, blur the lines between entertainment and education, comically trashing people with whom they disagree, and making the government seem like a common sense solution to every problem. We need our own edutainers. The recent release of the album Veracity by Backwordz certainly fits the mold and is an interesting first step.  Likewise, Pork Barrel, which is as fun as it is informative, will destroy even the most ardent statists faith in the efficacy in just a few hands – about 35 hours faster than reading Atlas Shrugged.

In the marketplace of ideas, political opinions are bought and sold not by political philosophers, but by every form of media we consume everyday. 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 taxes to pay for police, schools and roads – but the more they know about $270,000 janitors, $80,000 speech therapies for mice and a $9,600,000 health bill for dead people, the more questions they will ask – and that is the first step.

Preston Chaffee is an expert on government waste, fraud and abuse and the creator of “Pork Barrel – America’s Least Favorite Card Game.”

 Pork Barrel is available for preorder at https://www.playporkbarrel.com/.

EDITOR’s NOTE: The views expressed are those of the author, they are not representative of The Libertarian Republic or its sponsors.

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