Every family has one: a relative who seems to have outstayed their welcome and falls to the bottom of the “who do we like best” list. We (America) have just such an unsavory relative: our uncle (a rich one, at that) whom we refer to as Uncle Sam. Uncle Sam has been around since the War of 1812 and has portrayed the embodiment of the government under which we operate. Lately, though, he has fallen into disfavor and I think he’s getting a bum rap.
Uncle Sam has lasted a good long while and survived under guiding hands that were better suited for other lines of work. He has endured booms and busts, wars and peace all the while protecting his family and providing for it at the same time. Someone recently described government as that which provides in ways that individuals cannot and I think that’s an apt portrayal.
Would you want to rely on a never-ending number of folks in charge of the highways and other parts of our infrastructure? Traveling from one town (or county or state) to the next would entail a wide range of conditions if it were not for a governmental agency overseeing the consistency. Want to put in your own water system or street lights? I doubt it, yet we are railing against what is currently seen as a greater role of government in our daily lives.
The latest, of course, is health care reform. Can we agree that innocent, hard-working people are being ground into grist as they try to cover exorbitant medical bills? If so, can we agree that something must be done to prevent the further degradation in the health of our “family”? The free market? Well, I haven’t seen much voluntary reform from insurance companies or hospitals or trial lawyers, have you? And the Republican chant of “the wrong way to reform” strikes me odd since that group controlled the White House and Congress from 2000-2006 and made not so much as a peep for a change in the way we deal with our sick and uninsured. That tells me they were pretty happy with the status quo and today’s mewlings from the right are more about sour grapes and less about you and me.
Uncle Sam is wasteful, you cry, and chockfull of abuse. You mean just like every other bureaucratic enterprise? Enron, AIG, and the like? Boy, now those guys knew how to run a company, huh? We all laugh at the poster where five men are leaning on shovels while one digs and we compare that to the efficiency of Uncle Sam. Have you ever needed assistance with a household project? Your helper(s) spends a good deal of time standing around awaiting your instructions or for you to complete a portion where assistance is not required. How long would it take to finish the job if you sent him home until the very moment you needed him? And how efficient? Larger construction projects, whether private or public, differ only in scale and the idleness of some is inherent in the tasks at hand.
Yes, there’s a good bit of Uncle Sam in our lives today, but most is concerned with keeping us safe and productive. The EPA, the FDA, the FCC, and the myriad of other agencies are all tasked, in one way or another, with safeguarding and/or regulating our food, water, medicines, work places, highways, and the like. If we had something I call corporate conscience, most of these departments could be disbanded. But it seems that we don’t and we need our Uncle to come in and make sure no one is selling us snake oil. That takes money and inspectors: two crucial elements left to whither on the vine in recent years and such failures lead us only to lament more loudly about our Uncle’s impotence.
The frustration with our current economic lot and the associated challenges it poses is more than understandable. To castigate our Uncle Sam and brand him as the root of all of our misery is nothing more than a campaign slogan used by those on the outside looking to be those on the inside. Remember Newt Gingrich’s Congressional Revolution of 1994 and his Contract With America? Read Joe Scarborough’s “Rome Wasn’t Burnt In a Day” and you’ll see what I mean.
In the meantime, let’s give our Uncle Sam a break. The system that created him is still the best available and we need to separate the rhetoric from the reason before we can identify the true level of governmental intrusion and whether its presence is helpful or hurtful. It takes a little more effort, true, but what’s that they say about “any thing worth having...”?
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