For some time now I’ve been struggling to find a good way to explain one of the most important ways in which the “small government” part of conservatism is a con—why it achieves the opposite outcomes of what it purports to achieve. I knew, intuitively, that attempts to force “smaller government” so often end up making government not only worse, but bigger. It was the perfect illustrative example that escaped me.

David Sirota has found it:

Like most people, I dislike spending time at the Division of Motor Vehicles.

But during a recent attempt to obtain a driver’s license, I discovered The Lesson of the DMV — one that flips economic dogma on its head, and that America should keep in mind as our state legislatures convene this winter.

When I walked into the drab office in Aurora, Colorado a few weeks ago, I was given a ticket with a number on it. Let’s just say my number was much higher than the number currently being called. I sat down with about 75 others, and after an hour, we were told the computer system crashed, meaning we had to come back another day.

The next week, I visited a different office to try again. I took my number and waited two more hours as three DMV employees struggled to service a crowd of 125 people.

By the time I posed for my license photo, I had spent three total hours in a DMV office, as had at least 200 other people.

While I smiled for the camera, I considered this mundane encounter with state government in economic terms. Between all the people I waited with, about 600 combined hours of economic output was extracted from the state and thrown away. Multiply that over an entire year throughout any given state, and you see how poorly run public services take a severe — and hidden — toll on a state’s economy.

Services, of course, do not fail in a vacuum. They fail because budget cuts leave them lacking adequate resources to succeed. While Republican economics teaches that less government spending means a stronger, more efficient economy, my experience at the DMV suggests otherwise, as does this state’s overall experience as a test tube for conservatives’ budget and tax doctrine.

Read the whole thing, and not just because it makes such an important argument so well. Read it because it is David’s inaugural column for Creators Syndicate. Which is a milestone for the people-powered progressive movement known as the “Netroots.” David is one of its leading citizens. Now he’s the first among us to be granted a berth in the hundreds of small- to medium-sized newspapers that provide the main source of political information for so many Americans who’d never read a blog. That’s even more revolutionary given this crucial report about how most op-ed pages in papers like that are dominated by writers representing the dying regional political faction known as “conservatism.”

And, when the columnists aren’t conservative, they’re generally go-along-to-get-along, inside-the-beltway hacks.

Congratulations to David for breaking the lock. Contact your local paper and tell them they should be carrying David Sirota.