David Boaz

Doomsayers are given too much credence by scientific institutions and the press.

For a hint of what Washington bureaucrats think of the rest of the America, take a look at this letter to the Wall Street Journal:

You say the average federal civil worker makes more than the average private sector worker. That’s true, but this isn’t even an apples and oranges comparison — it’s more apples and filet mignon. The federal government doesn’t sell fast food or operate large-scale retail stores using minimum-wage employees. So yes, medical researchers at the National Institutes of Heath [sic] and the Centers for Disease control [sic] are paid more than entry-level workers at McDonald’s. Yes, intelligence analysts in the Department of Defense and State Department diplomats working under harsh conditions around the world are paid more than Wal-Mart greeters. And, yes, the thousands of dedicated doctors and nurses caring for our wounded and disabled veterans in the Department of Veterans Affairs are paid more than a new barrista [sic] at Starbucks.

Max Stier
President
Partnership for Public Service
Washington

Max Stier, a lobbyist on behalf of government, whose official biography boasts that he “has worked previously in all three branches of the federal government,” sees medical research and intelligence analysis when he thinks of the federal government. And when he thinks of the 124 million Americans who work in the private sector, he can only imagine McDonald’s clerks, Wal-Mart greeters, and Starbucks coffee servers. Stereotypes, anyone?

As I wrote a few years ago, some people in Washington look across the fruited plain and see only a vast and barren wasteland interrupted by federal bureaucracies.

Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) said in 1992, “The ballot box is the place where all change begins in America”–conveniently forgetting the market process that has brought us such changes as the train, the skyscraper, the automobile, the personal computer, and charitable or self-help endeavors from settlement houses to Alcoholics Anonymous to Comic Relief.

Entrepreneurs and businesses in America satisfy far more of our needs than coffee, Big Macs, and cheap clothes, as useful as those things are. Housing, for instance. Planes, trains, and automobiles. Software and computer networks. Entertainment. Medical research. (Yes, there’s some done at NIH. There’s more done by pharmaceutical companies.) Compound interest. In that earlier article, inspired by the latest proposals for some niggling regulations of banking services, I suggested:

Consider the presumptuousness of such a bill and the relative contributions of banks and senators to our lives. Civil society, hampered at every turn by petty political rules, takes thousands of years to develop the technology, the complex market mechanisms, and the levels of trust necessary for individuals to be able to get cash, at midnight, in an airport or a 7-Eleven thousands of miles from home, from a bank that they do no other business with–and members of Congress decide that the bank shouldn’t be able to charge a dollar for that service. Imagine what kind of banking services we’d have if we had to wait for Congress to develop the necessary institutions, and then imagine what we might have if Congress got entirely out of the business of controlling, hamstringing, and bullying banks.

Has Max Stier ever tried to do business with American Express and the Social Security Administration, Federal Express and the U.S. Postal Service, McDonald’s and the DMV? His demeaning of 124 million American workers in the attempt to defend the above-market wage rates of bureaucrats is laughable. But it’s also insulting, and utterly revealing of the Washington mindset.

From Walter Scott’s “Personality Parade” in Parade Magazine (to be posted here soon):

Q: How much time do former President Carter and wife Rosalyn devote to their Habitat for Humanity projects?

A: Since 1984, they have spent one week each year on Habitat projects, helping to construct 2,733 new homes.

In a story on people without health insurance, NPR interviewed a spokesman for a “consumer advocacy group” who warned that we shouldn’t get rid of the estate tax (so we can spend more tax dollars on health care). Yeah, that’s what consumers think — except for the 68 percent of them who do want to repeal it.

What’s the best business to be in these days? Steel? Automobiles? Maybe not any more. Maybe these days it’s software, or finance. Maybe. But judging from this lead story in this morning’s Washington Post —

The three most prosperous large counties in the United States are in the Washington suburbs, according to census figures released yesterday, which show that the region has the second-highest income and the least poverty of any major metropolitan area in the country.

Rapidly growing Loudoun County has emerged as the wealthiest jurisdiction in the nation, with its households last year having a median income of more than $98,000. It is followed by Fairfax and Howard counties, with Montgomery County not far behind.

— it would seem that government is the boom industry of the early 21st century. That’s the point Chris Edwards made in a Tax & Budget Bulletin (pdf) three months ago: that compensation of federal employees was almost twice compensation in the private sector. Then three months later, things changed, as things have a way of doing. Chris was forced to admit that the government’s latest figures showed that federal compensation was no longer almost twice private-sector compensation: it was exactly twice as much. “Average compensation for the 1.8 million federal civilian workers in 2005 was $106,579 — exactly twice the average compensation paid in the U.S. private sector: $53,289.”

Mamas, don’t let your babies grow up to be cowboys,

Don’t let ’em make software and sell people trucks,

Make ’em be bureaucrats and fed’rals and such.

The big scandal in public (or actually government) broadcasting is that the taxpayers are forced to pay hundreds of millions of dollars a year for the propagation of unremittingly liberal views on politics and policy. As I said in my testimony to the Senate last year, I agree with some of the liberal attitudes of NPR and PBS, but I don’t think taxpayers should be forced to subsidize my views or those of anyone else.

The second biggest scandal is that when Republicans get control of the federal government, they don’t relieve the taxpayers of that burden. Maybe it’s because they know the old advice, “Never pick a fight with people who buy ink by the barrel.” Or who have their own nationwide broadcast networks. But it’s unbelievable to me that Republicans appropriate money every year for two networks that could be called ARN, the Anti-Republican Network.

The third biggest scandal is that instead of just privatizing PBS and NPR, Republicans appoint public broadcasting officials who go in like a bull in a china shop and try to force a bunch of liberal journalists to include conservative shows and perspectives. The government shouldn’t be telling journalists how and what to report. Instead, it should just free them to report as they choose, with money from investors and customers rather than taxpayers.

And I guess the fourth biggest scandal is the one making headlines today: that the chairman of the Broadcasting Board of Governors (which oversees the federal government’s international broadcasting), who used to be chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, is alleged to have improperly used his office. In a State Department report made public by three Democratic members of Congress, Tomlinson is accused of putting a friend on the BBG payroll — something that never happens elsewhere in the federal government — and using office resources to support his personal horse-racing operation, which I suppose goes beyond the March Madness pools conducted in every federal office.

Maybe when conservatives get tired of being hit over the head by tax-funded broadcast networks, and liberals get tired of conservatives trying to meddle in the networks’ reporting, they could both agree to privatize PBS and NPR, freeing them from political intervention and freeing the taxpayers from being coerced to support what Thomas Jefferson called “the propagation of opinions which [they] disbelieve.”

Not to Scottish pubs, I write in the Guardian’s Comment is free, where a survey says patronage is down 10 percent since a smoking ban went into effect. But if you wondered where all the anti-smoking fascists have gone, check out the commenters.

Not to the pub, according to figures from Scotland, where anti-tobacco fascism is chipping away at freedom of choice.

Cartoon editors are painstakingly working through more than 1,500 episodes of classic Tom and Jerry, Flintstones, and Scooby Doo cartoons to erase scenes of characters – gasp – smoking. Turner Broadcasting says it’s a voluntary decision, but the move comes after a report from Ofcom, which has regulatory authority over British broadcasters. So in this case “censorship” seems a reasonable term.

It’s not the first time. France’s national library airbrushed a cigarette out of a poster of Jean-Paul Sartre to avoid falling foul of an anti-tobacco law. The US postal service has removed the cigarettes from photographs on stamps featuring Jackson Pollock, Edward R. Murrow, and Robert Johnson. And in the 20th-anniversary rerelease of ET, Steven Spielberg replaced the policemen’s guns with walkie-talkies.

On one level, this is just a joke: they are redrawing cartoons to make them more kid-friendly. And just to make the rules completely PC, Turner is allowed to leave cigarettes in the hands of cartoon villains.

But there’s something deeper here: an attempt to sanitize history, to rewrite it the way we wish it had happened. Smoking is a part of reality, and especially a part of history. Just look at any old movie. Everyone smokes: doctors, pregnant women, lovers. Real people smoked, too – people like Murrow and Pollock and Sartre. And some of them died of lung and throat cancer, which parents and teachers can point out. It’s Orwellian to airbrush historical photos in order to remove evidence of that of which you disapprove.

Franklin D. Roosevelt spent decades trying to conceal the fact that he was confined to a wheelchair. Historians say that out of more than 10,000 photographs of FDR, only four show him using a wheelchair. Those are the ones that are now used in textbooks and at the FDR Memorial in Washington. One victory for historical accuracy. However, the FDR Memorial removed the ever-present cigarette from FDR’s hands. Orwell’s ministry of truth would be proud.

(Excerpted from Comment is free.)

Politically correct attempts to pretend no one ever used tobacco are a betrayal of historical fact.