I spent part of the afternoon today in a Virginia DMV office, and I can’t think of a better case-study in what’s wrong with government.

The state of Virginia is currently in a financial crisis; the governor has already said that this crisis will mean, among other things, longer lines at the DMV. The ‘other things’ include, of course, increased taxes, as well as things like the shuttering of the just-built Northern Virginia Community College medical campus in Springfield.

It’s hard to think of a worse plan.

The community college’s medical training programs would result in a lot of people who are now only marginally employed moving into paraprofessional positions that pay more. This would result in more income taxes, sales taxes, and property taxes for the state. Having spent $23 million to build the thing, though, we won’t be able to reap any benefits from it because of a lack of $12 million for hiring staff.

The DMV, on the other hand, is crowded not because it’s understaffed, but because it’s understaffed for its constantly expanding roster of net-loss activities. The DMV’s main activity is to maintain a database. Sure, there are driver’s tests and the like, but the DMV’s primary purpose is to maintain a database of vehicle and driver information. This can be done very cheaply, and without long lines at the offices.

But the DMV is also used to enforce child-support laws, truancy laws, and dozens of other laws that have nothing to do with motor vehicles or their operation, in addition to enforcing vehicle-related laws that duplicate other laws already on the books. Once entry into the database becomes contingent on a dozen random factors, maintaining that database becomes a very complicated affair.

In any sane world, I wouldn’t have been at the DMV today at all.

It’s generally illegal in Virginia, as it is in most states, to operate a vehicle without adequate liability insurance.

I own a number of cars, including one that doesn’t have any liability insurance on it. This isn’t a problem, since the car is in pieces, and isn’t too likely to run into anyone.

I recently discovered, though, in threatening letters sent to me from the DMV, that it’s illegal for a car to be even registered in Virginia without insurance. My car was registered, and because there was no insurance on it, my driver’s license was suspended.

I had to go there to cancel the registration and provide an affidavit that the car hadn’t been operated without insurance. Because I’d delayed in doing this, I had to pay $30. Had I gone in last week, I wouldn’t have had to pay anything.

My car, sitting in my driveway, was no danger to anyone. But the state of Virginia employs someone – probably several people, and a bunch of computers – to go through the entire vehicle register, making sure that every car with a license plate is insured.

Never mind that it’s illegal to drive the car – and actually generate any potential for liability – without insurance, and never mind that getting into an accident with an uninsured car opens you up to yet more criminal and civil penalties, running into jail time and bankruptcy. It has been decided that the car can’t be registered without insurance, so there’s another thing to charge uninsured people with. And so I was at the DMV today, taking up the state’s time and money.

While I was waiting – I had failed to anticipate the wait time, so I didn’t have enough to read – it occurred to me that, in this time of state fiscal crisis, it would be better to actually reduce the government’s activities, rather than force people to wait longer for these activities to be carried out.

You could say that Virginia’s stance is defensible, and that this is in fact a good use of resources. I’m certainly in favor of liability insurance; everyone who’s ever run into me hasn’t had any. I’d support seizing all the assets of people who are at fault in accidents with no insurance, and giving the proceeds to the injured party. And then I’d support attaching the uninsured party’s wages, or throwing him in jail. I am not, to put it mildly, suggesting that anyone should be allowed to drive around without being able to meet his potential financial responsibilities. I can certainly agree with the putative aim of keeping uninsured drivers off the road

But here’s the thing: Virginia’s strategy for this doesn’t work. It doesn’t even pretend to work. When I cancelled my registration this afternoon, I didn’t have to hand over the plates. Oh, sure, the computer knew that they were invalid, but they looked valid for another 14 months. Driving around with them on a car is illegal, but then it’s illegal to drive around without insurance anyway.

And had I wanted to keep the registration valid and avoid the insurance question all together, I could just have paid the state a $500 “uninsured motorist fee” and been done with it.

That’s right. If you are so incredibly wealthy that you can come up with five hundred dollars, the state apparently assumes that you’ve got the means to self-insure. Given the cost of insurance for people with bad driving records, I’m sure that most of the worst drivers in Virginia are uninsured, and that that they’re uninsured quite legally.

And this is the case while the state is spending money to threaten me with jail because one inoperable car has a valid registration.

So here’s my suggestion for government cost-cutting. In the first round, don’t try to cut programs or departments just because they’re expensive, or politically unpopular, or seemingly optional, like art classes, vocational training, park maintanance, and the like. The very first step is to cut the expenses that are utterly useless, and that provide no net revenue to the state or benefit to the people.

Cut the activities that do nothing but cost the state money and lost productivity. Things that you want to make illegal, make them illegal only one way and not seven. The state will save money on lawyers and bureaucrats, and the state’s economy will gain by not having people waste their time dealing with idiotic regulations.

With the money thus saved, the state can think about making investments in things like vocational training; and there can be a meaningful debate on whether the state should do things like subsidize vocational training at all.