Anyone looking for anecdotal evidence of state ambition can find it by perusing newspapers for a month, but sometimes the truth is obvious enough to make detective work unnecessary. I was reminded of this when the daily paper in my corner of America the Beautiful curtsied to the government last Sunday. Front-page stories on local and national issues were juxtaposed to great effect.
Armed with a metaphorical shotgun from the peace-loving but ferocious firm of Rockwell, Dieteman, and De Coster, I scooped the local fish wrap off my driveway that morning to find that I had stumbled into a libertarian skeet-shooting tournament where some newsroom paste-up person or her editor had just yelled, "Pull!" The result may be amusing to paleoconservatives and Rothbardian anarcho-capitalists everywhere.
The fish wrap in question goes by the name of the San Luis Obispo County (California) Tribune. On July 22, 2001, a syndicated story from the Washington Post took pride of place above the fold. The story was headlined, "Bush sticks to position on Kyoto." Following a formulaic description of continued American refusal to toe the international line on climate change and what, if anything, to do about it, reporter William Drozidak left Asia behind to describe the "New Deal" that leaders of eight industrialized countries propose for Africa. This initiative is "designed to boost the continent's living standards, enhance democracy, curtail corruption, expand the use of new technologies, and control the trafficking in small arms that promote regional wars."
The bad grammar got me first. Does no one proofread anymore? While I was cringing at the lack of subject-verb agreement, the bad policy crept in like a border collie trying to swipe a peanut butter cracker off the kitchen counter. Criminy! If this initiative for Africa were a business plan rather than a monument to the egos of world leaders, it would be laughed off the table by any self-respecting venture capitalist. Every one of its five stated goals is ambiguous and ambitious.
Never mind the unsubstantiated link between small arms trafficking and war (reporters rarely locate the cause of warfare in unreformed human hearts because it is easier to blame and ban bazookas than to take the biblical call for repentance seriously). Thanks to this well-meaning but unworkable initiative, a Jonah Goldberg-style invasion of Africa suddenly sounds less far-fetched. I have a better idea: let's "enhance democracy" by suggesting that politicians who hit free speech whenever they aim at campaign finance reform not bestir themselves to observe elections in Africa. We can do that without spending taxpayer money.
Halfway through a bowl of the "Organic Gorilla Munch" that my children like, having read the ecological propaganda for young minds on the back of the cereal box, I turned back to the newspaper and found that it had another nugget on page one. Next to the piece about the Group of Eight meeting in Genoa, Italy, from which sound bites about global warming and African rescue had been extracted, there was a local story. The headline on the homegrown piece said "Moving out of the county's way," and the accompanying photo showed a woman at a bakery counter serving a doughnut to an unseen customer.
Tribune reporter Rick Jackoway profiled small business owners whose popular doughnut shop is being razed to make room for a $40 million government center. The new building will consolidate offices for county employees who currently work in about 24,000 square feet of leased space throughout the downtown area. Unlike the doughnut shop owners, the government workers take scheduled coffee breaks twice a day. Pay no attention to the math behind the curtain, or you might wonder why it takes a 90,000 square-foot building to consolidate employees now working in 24,000 square feet.
The doomed doughnut shop sits in a prime location across the street from the county government center and on a high-visibility corner. The shop is owned by Meng ("Bob") Gau and his wife Sim, who fled the killing fields of Cambodia in 1978, spent two years in a Thai refugee camp, and came to America in 1981. The Gaus are now negotiating payment and relocation terms with the county, which according to the Tribune story offered to pay them less for their business than the Gaus themselves paid when they bought the shop 12 years ago.
County government, meet world government. Is it any wonder that Lew Rockwell's Thirty-Day Plan and Larry Elder's Ten Steps to Fix America both envision drastic cuts in government size? Seeing the doughnut shop story next to the Kyoto story was like comparing before and after photographs in a testimonial for weight gain supplements. Yo! Limited government! Tired of having private citizens kick sand in your face just because they studied things like the Bill of Rights? Grow the state payroll enough and you can be the one doing the kicking, at home and abroad.
July 27, 2001
Patrick O'Hannigan is a technical writer in California.
