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Tom Bigler
Sunday, February 06, 2000 Page:
ANOTHER irritating but popular cry among many candidates in this intensely
political year is, “We’ve got to get rid of big government.” Most of those
using the phrase are referring to the federal government.
These are candidates for Congress and for the presidency. For the most
part, they are referring to the regulatory aspect of government. Their cries,
motivated mainly by significant campaign contributors and political
supporters, are intended to result in deregulation. It would satisfy, for
example, an industry that wants to dump hazardous waste into the nearest
stream without first neutralizing the waste.
It comes from those who insist on the clear-cutting forests, regardless of
the impact on soil erosion and even the climate.
Deregulation is proposed by those who don’t want food inspectors in the
meat packing line and those who have been assigned to ensure that medicines
are safe and effective for the patient. Those who oppose regulation, ignoring
history, persist in efforts to allow banking to provide potential conflicts of
interest as the sale of insurance or of stocks and bonds. They ignore the
belief that democracy is best served by a multitude of voices and seek to
allow public communication to be controlled by only a few.
Among the things that these opponents to regulation choose to forget are
that virtually all regulations are a consequence of the legislation that
Congress has enacted and the chief executive has signed. Sometimes the
regulations are spelled out in the legislation. Often regulations are a result
of those charged with enforcing the law trying to make its application fair
and universal. However, sometimes the effort to translate legislative intent
into practice becomes difficult. And sometimes this translation seems nigh
impossible.
A timely example of this is the Internal Revenue Service, which has the
unhappy task of translating legislative intent regarding taxes into language
that those being taxed can understand and then collecting and auditing the
results.
Sometimes, it seems that the legislature doesn’t want the agency to be able
to do this, as was the case in the Reagan administration when funding for the
IRS was sharply reduced, but its task greatly complicated. In the last decade,
there have been more than 8,000 changes in the federal tax code. Most of these
have been designed to take care of a narrow class of constituents, but the
consequence is a code that is so complex that just last month there was a
report in the New York Times that at least some people in the IRS had decided
that because it took too much time to audit the returns of a major corporation
or a wealthy family, they would stop concentrating on these taxpayers and
devote their attention instead to you and me.
Invariably the critics of big government imply that much of what now
concerns the federal government should be given over to the states. These
advocates already are demanding that federal funds, instead of being allocated
for specific programs, simply be returned to the states to do with whatever
the individual state deems best. Their cry is, “One size does not fit all.”
But isn’t ours a nation? Isn’t the federal government the national
government? Doesn’t it set the major social, economic, political, foreign and
defense policies for us all?
Under the Articles of Confederation, the early colonists quickly discovered
the impossibility of having each state devise its own laws, its own
immigration policies, its own currency, its own duties covering import and
export of goods from one state to another. The result was utter chaos and the
people from all the colonies quickly replaced it with a national government –
the federal government.
How many of the 50 states, if left to their own devices, would have a
Social Security program, Medicare or even a Medicaid program? How many would
have air pollution controls – especially since air basins are not respecters
of temporal political boundaries? How many would see highway construction in
their states develop into a pattern that could be merged with all contiguous
states? The first Emperor of China decided what was essential for creating a
nation: There first must be a common currency, a common language and common
laws.
The problem may not be big government, but rather too much government. It
is interesting that New York state, with just as complex a society as
Pennsylvania, manages to function with fewer than half as many counties as
exist in Pennsylvania. Or that Connecticut can function at least as well as
New York or Pennsylvania without any counties at all.
In the end, the critics of big government seem to forget that government is
a tool created of, by, and for the people, to serve their needs and their
common interests. It does not belong to any political group. It does not
belong to the party with the majority of elected office holders. It is not
something that can be discarded or changed without the consent of the
governed. Big government is a product of the demands of the public.
Tom Bigler is professor of communications at Wilkes University and a Times
Leader columnist. His column is available online at www.leader.net