I'm not saying it couldn't be successful if implemented over time. I'm saying it ain't gonna happen in 4 years even if magic happened and Ron Paul were actually elected. Such a violent jolt to the economy would be suicidal if implemented immediately and Paul would be hated more than Bush and Clinton combined.
That’s just like unsocialism-izing over time. Until you take the last step, you’re still a socialist.
For an interesting treatment of the abrupt versus the incremental strategy pros and cons, you might start with “Atlas Shrugged”. Yes, I know, it’s a novel, but there are a lot of truths concerning human nature there as well, at least one of which is the nature of power. Humans don’t like to give it up.
No, IMO, there needs to be the equivalent of a “surgical strike” to cut all the irrelevancies out of the government. Yes, there would be mass confusion for a while, but in the end you would not have millions of bureaucrats still employed on the taxpayer dime trying to figure out how to reverse incremental “reforms”.
Nothing ever happens in government except "over time." In response to the nightmare scenario you propose, can you imagine the sheer nuclear release of revenue and jobs if the same wasteful inefficient indolent programs were moved into the private sector, along with an explosion of cash that used to be siphoned off for the taxes to support such waste? It would make Reagan's "morning in america" look like a cloudy morning during the winter solstice at the north pole. Economic dislocation was the terror stricken squall of the socialists at the beginning of the Reagan tax cuts. Freedom produces blesing, optimisim, and prosperity. Socialism produces slavery, timid fearfulness, and poverty. I prefer the economic dislocation of buggy whip manufacturers to the thought of government meddling because of 'the price of human misery.' That misery is ameliorated in a free society better than socialism ever could.