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D.C. vs. America, With Time Running Out November 19, 2009 If you’re fighting the holiday blues, National Suicide: How Washington Is Destroying the American Dream from A to Z is not for you. The paleoconservative cri de coeur skillfully skewers the federal government’s profligacy, incompetence, and selfishness. In dozens of chapters, author -- and Greenwich resident -- Martin L. Gross details the polices that hobble the nation’s standard of living and squander our economic future. Duplication of “services” is a recurring topic. The federal government has “70 different programs in 13 different … agencies” that target youth drug abuse. Ninety programs involve preschool, and 28 are tied to telecommunications. As for science, the feds are “highly involved in laboratories of all sorts, for a total of 515 research and development … labs, including 185 in the Department of Agriculture alone.” Mission creep is another villain that stalks taxpayers. The Department of Energy, writes Gross, “manufactures and stores nuclear weapons, researches solar-powered cars, and helps pay the heating bills for the indigent. It is heavily involved in climate change, environmental cleanup, and cutting-edge carbon capture and storage technologies.” (It performs few of its tasks well: “In a 16-year period, Energy worked on 31 projects costing over $100 million each, spent over $10 billion, then closed down half of them.”) The Department of Agriculture is another bureaucracy without borders. Its duties “include not only subsidizing farmers but running a juvenile delinquency agency, food welfare, a housing agency, a forest service, a utilities operation, and a bank. It also supports renewable fuels such as ethanol and operates a multitude of poorly designed sub-agencies that go far beyond agriculture.” Readers not living in the Rockies or along the Pacific coast might be surprised to learn that federal control of the West is a significant contributor to high energy prices. Writes Gross: “In Nevada, Alaska, Utah, Oregon, and Idaho, the federal government owns a majority of the state’s land. Washington also owns almost half of the land in Arizona, California (45%), Wyoming (42.3%), New Mexico (41.8%), and Colorado (38.6%).” There’s an abundance of petroleum, natural gas, and oil shale in those deserts, mountains, and tundra, but as long as eco-loon lobbyists call the shots, it won’t be extracted. Even politically correct energy is becoming off limits -- Gross describes the Bureau of Land Management’s moratorium on solar projects “so that the agency could conduct an environmental study before America could proceed with making the solar power in needs.” National Suicide’s best passage ships the most sacred public-policy cow off to the abattoir. Revisiting ground he covered in 1999’s The Conspiracy of Ignorance, an exposé of the failures of America’s government schools, Gross dares to attack Big Education. “Teachers and the entire educational establishment,” he explains, “are academically inferior, are geared mainly to very young children, and have no place in the tutoring of anyone past the 4th grade.” While the Department of Education “does not, and never has, educated a single child,” it does “spend some $40 billion a year in K-12 education, all of which now seems to be wasted.” Rather than “forcing changes in the system through the use of its money, the federal government helps subsidize and maintain the present system of failure.” At 336 pages, National Suicide offers Gross enough room to wander off on personal tangents. His preference for tight federal regulation of the presidential-primary process is a head-scratcher. (If fedpols are so greedy and inept, why give them command of how the nation’s two dominant political parties pick their nominees for chief executive?) Since no one is forced to charge goods and services they can’t afford, the claim that Washington allows credit-card companies to impose “usuriously high” interest rates rings hollow. His China-bashing (“we are being economically raped by the Chinese”) doesn’t concede a single benefit of the complex Sino-American relationship, and his adoration of Harry Truman -- who did nothing to roll back the explosion of Big Government overseen by his predecessor in the White House -- is downright creepy. Still, Gross has penned a valuable field guide to D.C. madness. His compendium could prove useful for political activists and voters who are less than a year away from electing the entire House of Representatives and one third of the Senate. When pressed to react to the facts compiled in National Suicide, few incumbents or challengers will have much to say. Until that sad reality changes, “suicide” is not too strong a word to apply to a nation that is rapidly abandoning its limited-government heritage. D. Dowd Muska is a writer, commentator and lecturer. His website is www.dowdmuska.com. # # # # #
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