When I was still a farmer, I enjoyed raising hogs and sheep, so recent photos from Britain showing muddy animal carcasses being swung onto layer-cake piles of diesel-soaked straw bales, old railroad ties and coal are disturbing.
I feel for the animals and for the farmers who raise them. I realize that there is no alternative—the only way to control foot-and-mouth disease is to quarantine and slaughter. I am very glad we have APHIS.
What is APHIS? The Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service is the branch of the Department of Agriculture that is charged with preventing the outbreak of contagious diseases like foot-and-mouth. Like many other obscure agencies of government, it has contributed greatly to the prosperity and the standard of living that we enjoy in the United States.
There has not been an outbreak of hoof-and-mouth in the United States for decades, nor of Rinderpest, African swine fever or many other diseases that periodically flagellate livestock-producing nations.
More important, humans no longer get malaria or cholera or smallpox. I had measles in 1958 or 1959, as did most of the other kids in my hometown. Schools shut down for days, but it did not even make the state news, it was so common. Now, even a few cases of measles can make the national news.
Again, we have government to thank for the improvements in public health that people my age have experienced. More accurately, American citizens can thank themselves for having devised one of the most effective democratic governments in the history of humanity. It supplies the public goods and services necessary for private citizens and businesses to work and produce effectively. Without it, much of the energy and inventiveness of the U.S. people would be wasted.
The recent earthquake in the Pacific Northwest would have killed thousands in a country where state and local government did not devise and enforce adequate building codes. Local emergency services leaped into action with an alacrity that would amaze anyone from any country in Asia, Africa or Latin America.
Highway officials had completed retrofitting of bridges based on lessons learned from the Oakland earthquake. The FAA got an emergency control tower operating at SeaTac Airport within hours after the permanent facility was knocked out. Seismologists and structural engineers poured into the area to glean information to mitigate future quake damage.
As I write this, commentators are chuckling that warnings of a severe snowstorm in the Northeast were overblown. But in the Upper Midwest, hundreds of people died in blizzards such as that of Armistice Day, 1940, because of the lack of adequate warnings. Later this month, the Minnesota and Red River Basins may flood, but we have much more accurate forecasts than people did only decades ago.
These bread-and-butter activities of inspecting travelers at airports, monitoring seismographs, funding engineering research or predicting storms and floods are the Rodney Dangerfields of the public sector: They just don’t get no respect. Moreover, in the frenzy of promising tax cuts and denouncing big government, these agencies may suffer budget cuts that ultimately will hurt us all.
Anti-government demagogues like to point to a public sector that, in proportion to total output, is as large as it has as ever been in peacetime. But such mindlessly simple comparisons obscure key facts. Federal spending on interest payments has increased dramatically as we quintupled the national debt over the past two decades. And outlays for Social Security and Medicare have ballooned as the population ages and medical technology multiplies.
But spending on core government operations such as APHIS, the Geological Survey, the National Weather Service and the Federal Aeronautics Administration has shrunk substantially in real terms in the same two decades, while the population and economy have grown.
Some find government bashing easy, even as they benefit every day from government functions that Americans take for granted but that 5 billion people in other countries would love to have. Such critics should spend a few years in countries such as Rwanda, Papua-New Guinea, Myanmar or Paraguay to experience life without the cumbersome shackles of government.
History shows that nations prosper when private citizens have the necessary freedom to conduct their productive affairs, but where they also work collectively through government to provide those necessary goods and services that the private sector doesn’t spontaneously create. Lower taxes and smaller government do not necessarily make everyone better off.
© 2001 Edward Lotterman
Chanarambie Consulting, Inc.