In his State of the Union address to Congress, the very Democratic President Obama made good use of a thought from the first Republican President, Abraham Lincoln. As he transitioned from talking about education to an outline of his plans for energy and the environment, Obama said that “Government should do for people only what they cannot do better by themselves, and no more.”
Now that is a really good idea. The recognition that there should be limitations on what government attempts to do should appeal even to Ron Paul Libertarians. The goal of doing things for “the people” should even appeal to Senators Barbara Boxer, Dianne Feinstein or even Charles Schumer.
Since those extremes of political ideology are unlikely to come to agreement on much, it is incumbent on the rest of us to have a very good idea as to where we need such governmental attention and where we don’t, because there is a cost, economically and socially, when we make such a decision. Allow me to give a couple of real world examples.
My initial dip into the political pool came during the days when Richard Pombo was our Representative and chaired the House Committee on Resources. Pombo made his mark by railing against regulation, especially the Endangered Species Act and anything else that put limitations on agriculture. So let me outline the scope of an agricultural problem.
I am a member of the California Rare Fruit Growers and (Wednesday) morning, they sent out an alert. There is a citrus disease called “citrus greening” and it is spread from tree to tree via a tiny insect called the citrus psyllid. You won’t hear about this on the nightly news since it is costly, but not sensational. According to the alert I received: “Citrus Greening (called Huanglongbing in it’s country of origin, China) has now been confirmed in Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, South Carolina, Texas and most citrus-producing regions of Mexico. It was discovered in Florida in Sept. 2005. At the Second International Research Conference on Huanglongbing in January 2011, researchers estimated greening had already infected about 18 percent of Florida’s citrus trees, estimated at 70.6 million trees last year. Some say as much as 25 percent are infected. Thousands of acres of citrus are no longer producing saleable fruit and are now abandoned, with the psyllids continuing to spread the disease to nearby orchards.
A (University of Florida) study says that since the citrus seasons of 2006-07 through 2010-11, the disease has cost the state’s economy $3.6 billion over five years, including 6,611 lost jobs in agriculture and related industries.”
The alert came because the first instance of citrus greening was identified in the Rio Grande Valley. Since efforts to halt the spread of this disease have only slowed it’s progress, it is almost inevitable that it will come to California.
What then is the role of government in protecting this section of the agricultural industry? Should it be a national effort because it is already in multiple states? Should California take increasingly stringent state-wide measures to try to stop it’s spread here? Would we even miss the glass of orange juice at breakfast or be willing to pay more for an increasingly scarce and expensive product?
I can’t answer those questions myself. I count on the citrus experts in the CRFG to give me guidance.
The second regulatory area we need to mention is the Clean Air Act. The cost of poor air quality has been documented very carefully. A 2008 study by CSU Fullerton economics professors Jane V. Hall and Victor Brajer carefully documented the annual cost to California’s Economy at $28 billion. That is a big hit. It comes from premature deaths, missed school days, emergency room hospital visits, sick days and other productivity hits on employees. Even the legitimate taxes on that $28 billion would make a sizable dent in the state’s fiscal shortfall.
In the upcoming election you will hear a lot of demagoguery over regulation. The Clean Air Act will be a sizable target for Republican candidates as it has been the justification for taking action regarding global warming. We will be given a litany of the costs of regulation. In some manner, it will be part of every Republican candidate’s stump speech. On the other side, Democrats will hold up the goals of protection of our no longer pristine air and water, or returning them back to what they once were.
If we are to act as informed voters we will have to do a lot of work on our own. In both situations that I cited, there is clearly a lot that government can and probably should do. We need to insist that the cost of inaction becomes part of every discussion and challenge those who only want to complain about how our government is doing too much.
