WTF Wednesday: Furloughed Federal Workers Paid To Stop Other Feds Working

Let me get this straight.  The government can't pay it's employees, but it can pay employees to prevent all the other unpaid employees from working?

WTF??  As a result of the government shutdown, many government run enterprises have also been shut down.  Parks, museums and national parks have been closed and the employees told to stay home.  (In what is pretty much an attempt to inconvenience you and I enough to get us to hate the mean politicians who can't seem to do their own jobs.)

I guess, when you're dealing with such an intense money shortage, you have to cut corners but national parks where you can just walk in or national, open air monuments? Really?  The only way to keep people out is to pay guards to watch them. If they're being watched by guards, then why not just re-open the WTF-ing things??

If that wasn't stupid enough, check this out. It ... the government ... gets dumber.  A privately owned inn in North Carolina was ordered to close because it sits on federal land. (It's not a monument or a national park, it just happens to be on or near one.) The government doesn't care, they forced them to close.  The owner however, refused to close!  (Good for him!!)  So armed park rangers were sent in to force the guy to close and ordered to stand guard in front of the establishment and prevent anyone from approaching the inn and restaurant.  Owner Bruce O'Connell says, were he allowed to remain open, he would have paid the government over $30k in October alone.  (The rangers said they would remain there until they were 100% sure O'Connell wouldn't reopen.  I wonder what that will cost.)

Instead of making money, our "broke" government is spending money to stop people from making it money.  WTF??

Many others across the country are standing up to Big Brother as well and opening or working when they're told not to. Private citizens, like the WW II veterans I recently wrote about, have entered closed areas despite signs forbidding them to do so.

These "shutdown rebels" seem to be growing in number.  What do you think about this? Should people ignore all this crap and provide the services they feel they should and/or visit the places they have a right to visit?