If you were to suggest to most Americans that certain government agencies either should not exist, or should be dramatically scaled back, chances are good you’d either get some weird stares, or stern insistence that life as we know it would end without such agencies.

Granted, some level of bureaucracy is necessary for a modern society, but in all honesty, many of us have been conditioned by media, academia and governments themselves to believe that without the heavy hand of regulation, the world as we know it would end, and end badly.

But just as requiring doctors, lawyers, hair stylists and mechanics to have all sorts of government licensing and certifications has not ended malpractice or poor legal representation and bad service, the existence of a plethora of government agencies micromanaging every aspect of our lives hasn’t led to flawless representation either.

What’s more, many of the same agencies exist at the federal, state and local levels, with responsibilities overlapping so much, that sometimes no one knows who is in charge.

When agencies no longer function as designed, they become useless

Take the still-unfolding lead water scandal in Flint, Michigan. It’s easy to blame city and state environmental control and water quality officials for switching the city’s water supply to a polluted source, while failing to ensure that water was properly treated and sanitized. But the federal agency that is supposed to oversee state and local environmental operations failed miserably in its role, and yet no one has really been held to account for those failures, even though some state and local officials have already been charged with criminal conduct by the Michigan attorney general’s office.

Because you see, that is another problem with too much bureaucracy: Even though it is vital to a modern society (and ensuring that we are drinking clean water most definitely counts as “vital”), when that bureaucracy cannot hold itself accountable to the very people it supposedly serves, then we have a problem with an agency not really fulfilling its obligations to the people.

In the Flint case, in fact, local, state and federal environmental officials basically conspired to cover up the fact that the water was contaminated with levels of lead many thousands of times higher than federal limits, because officials at all three levels of government knew there was a problem – but chose not to act until the news broke in the media.

What good are all the agencies and departments if the personnel who run them are unaccountable? While state and local officials may be held to account, the Environmental Protection Agency regional director, Susan Hedman, was simply allowed to resign, meaning she will likely still be eligible for a fat government (taxpayer) pension, even though she is partially responsible for poisoning scores of children with lead-tainted water in Flint. And what’s more, Flint is hardly the EPA’s only water failure.

The people can do a better job taking care of themselves

As Americans, we have a right to expect that the agencies and departments our tax money pays for are not working to actively circumvent laws, rules and regulations that were put in place to ensure the maximum level of public safety. Water rules that are being violated, when identified, should immediately be corrected, and the offending officials, if they have violated statutes or regulations, be held to account. The same applies to rules concerning air quality, factory and agricultural run-off, and any other environmental protections that were put in place to protect our health, preserve our land and ensure that we leave a viable country to the next generation.

That can’t – and doesn’t – happen when other considerations and concerns, be they political, ideological or financial, get in the way of bureaucrats and public servants doing the job they were hired or appointed to do. The bureaucracy, on some level, is necessary, but it ceases to be effective, and thus becomes unnecessary, when it no longer functions as designed.

It’s hard to say at this juncture where all the chips will fall with regard to the Flint water tragedy, but one thing has become clear: If we can’t trust our agencies at all levels of government to work as designed, then they are of no use to us.

Besides, who’s to say that We the People can’t take better care of ourselves?

Sources:

NaturalNews.com
TheHill.com
NaturalNews.com
EPAWatch.org
Science.NaturalNews.com

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