My Word's Worth: a weekly column by Marylaine Block

vol. 1, #18, December, 1995

NO GOVERNMENT DAY

[Note: this was written when Congress failed to meet a funding deadline for the federal government, resulting in a shutdown of much of the federal government.]

Well, as you've probably heard by now, those fools in Congress did it -- shut down the government they hate so much they can hardly bear to keep on being paid by it. And even THAT they couldn't do right.

Because if they REALLY shut down the government, it would have been a historic educational experience for the American people, an opportunity to understand at last what government actually does.

The thing is, when government works right, it is invisible. The services it provides are SO basic, like the ground beneath our feet, that we assume their existence and forget that they are provided by government. We don't wake up every day and say, "Oh, good, there's ground beneath our feet!" We assume it.

I think it might be very healthy for us to actually have a day, or week, without government -- any government at all, federal, state, or local. I hesitate to say this in some ways, because if this really happened, a lot of people would die; in some ways I am proposing a human sacrifice on the altar of citizenship.

Let's start with the "essential" services, that were maintained this time around. People continued to read and interpret satellite and weather balloon data, and publish weather forecasts. If they stopped doing this, blizzards, tornadoes, hurricanes, and flash floods would kill people who have had no advance warning. Storms and downdrafts would take down aircraft.

Except, of course, aircraft would either not be flying at all, or would be flying blind, because air traffic controllers would not be working. Nor would the Coast Guard, dam operators or lock operators. Traffic on inland rivers would grind to a halt (costing millions of dollars), and the people in the arid west who so long to be freed from the burden of government regulation, would get their wish -- along with no water at all. Too bad.

And when disasters came, government-funded trauma centers and emergency rooms would not be working. No helicopter rescue units, paramedics, surgeons or nurses would be available 24 hours a day to patch people up. The Federal Emergency Management Administration would not swing into action to provide emergency shelter, food, clothing, first aid, and loans. The National Guard would not be available to maintain order and prevent looting.

The VA hospitals would all close down, of course. " Sorry about that liver transplant you were in the middle of, old man, but we're closing."

The guards and cooks at federal prisons would stop working, so we'd probably have some prison riots. Pity, because neither the National Guard nor the military would be available to put the riots down. And the FBI and state police wouldn't be available to chase down any of the violent prisoners who might escape.

Of course, if the military isn't working, nobody is monitoring that fancy radar setup to detect incoming missiles. Aren't we all glad the cold war is over?

The government would not be mailing out checks, either. Do you have any idea how many people depend on checks from the government to survive? We're not just talking about social security checks for little old ladies, either. We're talking about contractors waiting to be paid for work they've already done, hospitals waiting for Medicare and Medicaid reimbursement. We're talking about student loans, and federal mortgage loans and grant money. Civil servants would get no paychecks, and federal retirees would get no pensions. And when people didn't get their money from the government, they couldn't pay their bills, so the effect would ripple throughout the economy.

Then there's the whole regulatory apparatus. Nobody would be there monitoring our water or inspecting our meat. The FAA wouldn't be checking to make sure pilots have completely mastered the controls for each model of plane they're flying. The FDA wouldn't be available to notice that a new drug's side effects include seizures, coma, death, or deformed infants. The CDC wouldn't be available to notice epidemics in the making (from unmonitored water or meat?).

You see, even the "nonessential" personnel, whose absence might not be noticed for a day or two, are still performing, on a routine basis, all sorts of tasks which we don't know about or care about until they stop being done at all. At which point, unrepaired, uninspected, bridges and dams collapse, and unsafe, uninspected, planes fall out of the sky.

And that's just what would happen to the health and public safety and economic infrastructure governments provide. There's also a government-funded information infrastructure. Nobody would be collecting or publishing the basic data we rely on for virtually all our decision-making. Those half-hour business programs on all the networks would have nothing to talk about, because there would be no reports on GDP, balance of trade, quarterly earnings, population, housing starts, consumer price index, consumer debt, and so on. There would be no government research either: no studies of new epidemics, or promising therapies, or geological faults, or new technologies.

The government printing office wouldn't be publishing and preserving the records of our government's actions, so God knows what our officials would try to slip by us during the information blackout. And our libraries wouldn't be open to make that and other information, knowledge and wisdom available to all.

So, yes, in the long run, it might be a healthy thing to REALLY shut down the government. (Including not paying the salaries of the congress whose fecklessness got us into this mess.) Then maybe we could have the discussion some of us optimists thought we were going to get when these twits were elected: a discussion about what governments do, and what they should continue to do.

At least those that died in the process would have the comfort of knowing that it was for a good cause.

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