” I got during Basic Training, to wit: “you don’t have any Constitutional rights! You lost them when you signed up for the Army!”
All I remember from Basic Training is “Drop and give me 10” and “We don’t walk we Run” seems like it was all up hill going and up hill getting back.
You do have a point and I think a Smaller Government would help. Get rid of the IRS, DHS, and most of the three letter
departments.
I'd go with axing the agencies that aren't explicitly-named or implicitly-commissioned in the Constitution; that would be like the Treasury, the Post Office, the Navy, the Secret Service**, and [grudgingly] the IRS*. The Army is an intriguing special-case; by all rights it should be dissolved [into the States's militia] because its fundings aren't supposed to last more than 2-years... congress gets around this by continually budgeting the Standing Regular Army for two years every two years.
* Sadly the 16th Amendment is part of the Constitution, is it not?
** The SS is supposed to be anti-counterfeiting (one of the few Constitutionally explicit federal-level crimes).