Lieberman, who is seeking the Democratic nomination for president, accused the Bush administration of "stepping delicately around the bureaucratic failures that have long plagued our domestic defenses at the federal level." He said government officials and employees should be held personally accountable for such failures.
We all know that communications infrastructure that could have better warned us broke down. And why should we be surprised that intelligence broke down when all government services are disappointing?
Last month I deposited a Department of Treasury check. The bank spit it out because it didn’t like the micro line at the bottom. When I called Treasury, they said that they wouldn’t issue me a new check, because the one they issued was valid. The Credit Union doesn’t know how to proceed and Treasury isn’t offering any solution.
The question is why am I not getting any help? The reason is because no one but me gains anything from the help. Let’s say that the Treasury Department was a private business that owed me money. They would have an interest in making me happy, because they would want my future business. My future business would mean profit for them, and profit is the essence of their existence. In other words, they get my money when they perform good service.
The government, on the other hand, gets my money by the point of a gun. If I don’t pay my taxes, I go to jail. If I don’t like the service I get from an agency I am paying for, I have no recourse. That’s why our experiences at the Department of Motor Vehicles and the Post Office differ from that at Best Buy and Barnes & Noble.
Some private businesses fail to give us what we want and they pay the price of being run out of business. After years of cheap looking stores and low quality merchandise, K-Mart declared bankruptcy. For as bad as K-Mart is, I can’t think of a government agency that is any better.
It’s funny how otherwise intelligent people will argue for the value of government services for minutia when our own experience shows that private industry always makes up the void. The profit motive has always expanded our choices and given us better aggregate service.
Those Washington DC politicians that refuse to send their children to the public schools they created are a good example of how their failure is met with a free market solution.
Liberals have argued for bigger and bigger government until it can hardly communicate with itself. Those services that only the government can perform like defense and intelligence get bogged down in the governmental quagmire that creates too much other noise. How can any President keep abreast of intelligence information when the people demand that he address Education, Medicare, Social Security, Welfare, Childcare, Labor issues, and a myriad of other fringe issues?
The Clinton Administration was offered Bin Laden in 1995, but before a decision could be made, the chance was gone. This may be a product of Clinton’s disdain for foreign policy, but I doubt if the message had gone immediately and directly to him, Bin Laden would be anywhere but in our custody.
What we’ve done is turn our Federal Government into national cure-all, and we’ve made the President a clerk. Our modern leaders are supposed to embrace every fringe issues or else. There is now so much on a President’s plate that his actual constitutional duties take a back seat.
I don’t know if September 11th could have been prevented, but if Liberals want to argue that the government was inefficient then they are only echoing the chorus of conservatives. And unless liberals are calling for a reduction of government they aren’t offering a solution, just a way for blaming Bush for government inefficiencies they created.
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