US Government Shutdown and National Parks

Two pieces on the US government shutdown highlight the same oddity: why is it the National Parks Service that has closed?  Is it really the most inessential cost-saving?  Or is it, rather, the most publicly obvious?

Kurt Harden at Cultural Offering draws on Mark Steyn.  I particularly liked this:

“a visiting party of veterans pushed through the barricades and went to honor their fallen comrades, mordantly noting for reporters that, after all, when they’d shown up on the beach at Normandy it too had not been officially open.”

The Adam Smith Institute observes:

“So, in order to make the government shutdown more painful to the populace the US Government is cutting its own revenue by insisting that private businesses which pay it rent must close down.”