Steady as She Goes

An excellent column in Sunday’s Pittsburgh Tribune-Review by Bill Steigerwald (http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/opinion/columnists/steigerwald/s_577348.html) entitled “35 years of drug war failure” documents the inability of the DEA to make even the most trivial “improvements”, statistically-speaking, in the drug abuse (i.e., use of illegal drugs) landscape over the past 35 years. Their efforts are concentrated on picking low-hanging fruit like non-violent marijuana users, but overall they have had very little impact. And this is properly described as a “failure”, if one accepts that the stated goals are the criteria for success. However, if one adopts my number one rule about government as a criterion, then the DEA is spectacularly successful. That rule, for those of you new to this blog, is:

EVERY GOVERNMENT PROGRAM IS A JOBS PROGRAM

No exceptions! None! Not even in hallowed areas like “defense”. No, I can prove, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that the first and only priority of every government program, and therefore of every government agency, is to create and sustain a vast array of government and government-funded jobs, i.e. parasitical positions that have nothing to do with the free market – or with the actual needs of the citizenry. So, in the case of DEA, we have, as Steigerwald points out, cancerous growth in the size and power of the agency from its inception under Nixon… egregious abuse of American citizens, millions of whom have been turned into criminals by the “War on Drugs”, not unlike what happened under Prohibition in my parents’ day… serious erosion of respect for the law, and for the government… opportunities for power-hungry mini-fascists to exert themselves against more wholesome and productive citizens… making the U.S. the laughingstock of the world for its Puritanical approach to the drug “problem”… the huge economic cost of the “War on Drugs”, as well as the social cost on the domestic side and the credibility cost on the foreign policy side… the increased prosperity of criminal gangs in Latin America and terrorist organizations in the Near East, based largely on the lucrative nature of the drug trade, which is in turn based largely on the fact of that trade being illegal in the U.S., its prime source of customers… thousands of American citizens in jail who need not be… and so on. But on the plus side, the War on Drugs has generated millions of jobs, not only with the DEA but with law enforcement agencies, courts, lawyers, “corrections” personnel, etc. nationwide. In that sense, as Steigerwald also points out, the program is a success… and as I point out, it is, therefore, a typical government program – nothing less and nothing more. The fact that the human costs are so atypically high does nothing to change this, or ameliorate its consequences. On those rare occasions when it is pointed out that the impact of a government program is like unto “cruel and unusual punishment”, the response will always come back, “but it creates jobs”. And thus endeth the debate. (Did the locals complain when the Germans set up Auschwitz? Heck no. Think of the jobs it created!)

The key to success in this arena is to create a sort of homeostasis between “offense” and “enforcement” whereby a given government program doesn’t succeed, but cannot be proven to fail either, because, after all, “things could always be worse”. (True, we might have retirement homes full of crack addicts. Let us be thankful for small favors.) To ever actually win one of these bogus “wars” – like the one on drugs, the one on cancer, the one on terrorism – would be utterly catastrophic for the government agencies and vested interests in question. That’s the last thing they want, and the last thing they will tolerate. The idea is to have a perpetual “crisis” – a problem that never goes away, but that somehow still needs to be “fought”, with ever-expanding budgets and powers. So this non-change status that Steigerwald describes is no accident – in fact, it’s the ideal state of affairs, since the argument can be made that (1) at least things have gotten no worse; and (2) with more resources (i.e., taxpayers’ money) things might get better. This, of course, is an argument that can be made at any point in history – and has been, with obvious success. Heaven forbid the “War on Drugs” is ever won! But also, heaven forbid that things get so bad that people decide the agency, and the program, are useless, and so put it out of business. It is the steady state, the level line, that insures the perpetuity of the program and thus of the jobs it creates. Now, would it be too much of a “conspiracy theory” to speculate that the real intent of the program is precisely that, i.e. to keep things on an even keel – no better, no worse? Have a few high-profile “busts” from time to time just to reassure the public, but make sure you don’t really interrupt the flow of contraband in a serious way? Could it be that this is the real policy? All evidence seems to point in that direction.