Unveiling the Light

There is a new government scandal regarding care of our soldiers at Walter Reed Hospital. Now the Secretary of the Army has stepped down as a result of his inaction to better serve our veterans wounded in the service of their country. How could this happen? As far as that goes, how could it happen that billions are found unaccounted for in Iraq? How is it that government programs continually go over budget while also underperforming? Why is such scandalous behavior allowed to occur?

Well, who ever thought that the government could do anything efficiently? It is by its nature slow, expensive, susceptible to corruption, and prone to inefficiency and ineffectiveness. It is the greatest of all bureaucracies and any bureaucracy is less worried about its effectiveness than it is with its own continued existence. Government bureaucracies are the worst because of the layers of stake holders insulating it from the purpose it was designed to serve. This is why great institutions of the government fail to serve their stated purpose.

Walter Reed may say its goal is to serve the veterans in need but its real purpose is the survival of those who run the institution, followed by the needs of the military which funds it, then the re-election of politicians, then to look good to the public, and finally, to serve the soldiers who need their services. The only way soldiers move up the line of priorities is for us to suffer a scandal such as this, when we are shocked at their performance and hold the feet of the politicians and army to the fire. The hospital is not reacting to the people. It is reacting to the politicians and the Army who are suddenly threatened by the scandal.

This should be a lesson to us all to avoid depending on the government for our needs. That has been the trend lately and it is a false hope to think that we can depend on some bureaucrat who answers to a politician, to meet the needs of the people of our country. In doing so, we insulate the process from the market system and add layers of other interests that come into play before our own. In the end we are dissatisfied with the results, horrified at the costs, and threatened by the loss of personal freedom to a bureaucracy that is insulated from us and which only responds to us indirectly. A business that does not meet the needs of consumers will soon go bankrupt. A government bureaucracy that does not meet the needs of the consumer simply asks for more funding, a funding that comes from sources quite different from and insulated from those consumers.

Poor performance by the government should not be a surprise. It costs nearly $1.00 for every $1.00 of welfare delivered to the poor. The bureaucracy takes as much as it gives. Such a performance would result in widespread upheaval in the private system. In government it is seen as normal operating procedures. We have spent hundreds of billions if not trillions of tax dollars on our war on poverty since the 60s. Yet the poverty in this country has increased, not decreased. What’s worse is that bureaucratic rules have broken up families, made fathers largely redundant and sometimes a burden to poor households, and have helped to increase illiteracy, drop out rates, and crime rates exponentially while draining resources from citizens and private industry.

This is not to say that the people in government are evil, lazy or incompetent. There is something to be said for it drawing some of these traits to itself, but most people in government want to do good work. It is simply the nature of the beast. This is the main reason we should limit government and depend on private industry and the individual whenever possible. Handing over our health, welfare, and well being to the government may give us a feeling of security but it is a false feeling. As we are about to find out with government pensions, social security, and Medicare; the government is not able to provide us what we do not give it and it takes a large share of what it receives for itself.

The main danger of a large and bloated government is the potential and real loss of freedom. Bureaucracies tend to assume power to themselves. The danger of big government is that it seeks to control those it is supposed to serve. Our freedoms, to choose what we do with our lives, what we say, how we worship, our right to privacy and to private property, can all be in competition with the needs of the bureaucracy and it will try to control or eliminate that which threatens it.

We have to ask ourselves if a large, nanny government really does us good or are we trading away our freedom and our effectiveness for a sense of security that is both false and fleeting. The reason communist and socialist governments have failed to deliver to their people is not so much the ideology but what the ideology leads to. They lead to a bureaucracy that feels it knows better than the people it serves and that only it has the right to make choices for us. In the end we end up with a system that is bound to fail because it does not promote efficiency and effectiveness. Instead it works for the needs of those in bureaucracy who have wholly different goals.

Walter Reed Hospital is but a symptom of what is wrong with government. It is an ailment of self preservation that is best controlled by limiting its growth. The Fathers of our country knew this and severely limited the ability of government to interfere with its citizens and private commerce. We have been slowly eating away at these limitations, seeking the easy way out by turning over to government those responsibilities we should take on ourselves. Now we will be paying the price as the giant eats more and more production, freedom, and effectiveness at our expense. It has an appetite that is hard to satisfy and it will try to consume all that it does not already control.

Fr. Steven Foppiano