7/31/02
In praise of the bureaucrat
By Scott McLeod
If
you didn’t read Sunday’s New York Times, you missed a fine
article by the Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Thomas Friedman.
He synthesized very eloquently a belief I hold dear, one that is wildly
unpopular today — federal bureaucrats (and those at the state
and local level) are a vital part of America whose work should be
defended, not roundly criticized. In this age of Dubya, I know such views are heretical. Cutting government, though, is sometimes akin to cutting the throat of the little guy. Those bureaucrats are some of our society’s great equalizers.
I wasn’t reading the printed, $3 version of the Times this past Sunday, merely perusing the online edition for the latest on Lance Armstrong and the rescued miners in Pennsylvania. I love the Sunday Times, and in my perfect world I would spend three hours every weekend poring over its every word while juicing up on an entire pot of good coffee. In reality that just doesn’t happen very often.
Over the last three years — the time that we have been publishing The Smoky Mountain News — most Sundays have been spent in the office editing and writing stories. Many of those stories have focused on the land-use issues that have become so important to Western North Carolina. As tremendous amounts of money have flowed into these hills with retirees and the ensuing service industries, things have begun to change very quickly.
We’ve written many stories focusing on sediment and the degradation of our waterways. Current state laws mandate that developers use what are known as “Best Management Practices” when trying to keep dirt from being washed off their projects and into the water. The problem with North Carolina’s BMPs, though, is that they are the same in coastal Dare County as they are in mountainous Swain County. We have one set of rules for completely different terrains.
In essence, that means people building in the mountains can adhere to the rules and still spill tons of dirt into streams. That runoff robs the water of oxygen, kills fish, chokes off aquatic life, and begins the slow destruction of the ecosystem.
One reason the problem continues to grow is that we have too few state inspectors. A handful of specialists work out of the Asheville office of the Division of Water Quality and Division of Land Resources, and they are required to make sure hundreds of projects are meeting state requirements. It is simply impossible for them to do all that needs to be done. But we must depend on them, and I believe that eventually the state will be forced to make sure there are plenty of bureaucrats to adequately do the job.
Friedman, in his article, pointed out that the American system of capitalism is dependent on another set of bureaucrats, people who work in agencies like the SEC, the IRS, the FDA and a handful of others.
He was addressing the recent revelations that have sent Wall Street spiraling and caused many of us to wonder just how strong and resilient our brand of capitalism — and the prosperity it has wrought — truly is? Enron, Worldcom, Adelphia and others have forced us to confront the very real possibility that the entire system we place so much confidence in could very well be a myth, an apparition of accountants and financiers.
Friedman, though, thinks otherwise.
“What distinguishes America is our system’s ability to consistently expose, punish, regulate and ultimately reform those excesses better than any other. How often do you hear about such problems beings exposed in Mexico, Argentina, Russia or China?”
Which is why the fraud crackdown bill passed last week by Congress and supported by both parties is so important. After Aug. 14, corporate presidents who sign off on iffy audits and fraudulent accounting reports could very well face criminal charges and even prison.
And who will we rely on to be the watchdogs? The bureaucrats, of course.
The lawyers, accountants, clerks and inspectors who run the IRS and the SEC. And as Friedman pointed out, that is what really separates our brand of capitalism and our government. We have oversight agencies with workers who are not corrupt. Yes, they are influenced by the political aspirations of their bosses, but for the most part they continue keeping a check on the corrupting influences that many fledgling capitalist countries can never find a way to control.
Every time I hear some politician fighting to close some department or slash the budget of some regulatory agency, I try to imagine just what the people who work in that agency actually do. Sure, we must be constantly vigilant to fight waste and excess in government. But in a very real sense, the bureaucracy that George Bush and others constantly criticize is the vanguard of our democratic principles. One reason America works is because it has always policed itself.
If Wall Street is to rebound, it will be the bureaucrats who deserve credit, not the politicians. They are the foot soldiers. Or, as Friedman put it, “so much of America’s moral authority to lead the world derives from the decency of our government and its bureaucrats, and the example we set for others.”
(Scott McLeod can be reached at info@smokymountainnews.com)