Fourth of July weekend, shuttered state parks in Minnesota were tagged, defaced and ransacked and someone even took a can of spray paint and “added a body part to the Smoky Bear sign” at a ranger’s station. Of course, with billions of dollars in deficits, and Governor Dullard paralyzed by his own boredom – because… you know, “taxes”… – state parks and zoos get it in the neck. The visigothic sacking of Minnesota’s state parks illustrates the wisdom of having a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution, like some states have, to ensure that your budget is so full of gimmicks, tricks, deferred debt and accelerated revenue that you really have no idea how deep in it you are until the zoo is shut down and the giraffes are looking to you for answers. If you’re lucky, you can keep the real damage down until it blows up in your successor’s face. So, what would Ayn Rand do? Privatize the bejeebers out of those fucking parks, let armed, teabagging pieholes patrol them like Mr. Forest Ranger Sir, shooting free-loading picnic bears on site, let the market rule. Welcome to the privatization of open space, the Closure of the Commons. And, when you’re neck deep in unregulated campfires, smoking and s’mores, and everything is burning to the ground around you, and your campsite been ransacked of its firearms, and your daughter has been dragged out of the tent by a drunken mob of spring breakers, suddenly the thought of government intervention has a bit more appeal than it did when you were signing that checks at H & R Block in April. When the angry mobs of the poors start chasing down the rich with pitchforks and hotdog forks, bellowing demands for larger hobo bean rations and impaling rich people’s vital organs with barbecue skewers, then, suddenly, bigger government comes back into fashion. Some folks have to learn a lesson again, and again, and again, before they finally figure things out. So goes the history of the world.