Yet Another "Crisis"

During my Dakota County Leadership Academy (Minnesota) class this morning one of our guest speakers -- a City Manager of a city in the county -- mentioned that one of the key issues they are focused on is the "crisis" that the county does not have "fiber to the home..........high speed Internet..........." Now a true "crisis" is something like the genocide going on in Darfur or the government-forced abortions in China NOT whether or not a higher capacity telecom infrastructure needs to be mandated by the Minnesota legislature. The primary problem here is that government needs a "crisis" to justify some goal it wants to accomplish - just think about the "obesity crisis" and the calls for universal health care and early childhood education. Essentially a statement by government officials that we peasants are too stupid to manage our lives.

The speaker did not offer any details to justify why this is a "crisis" yet none of my class mates challenged him to explain. I opted not to get involved because I am very biased since I was a telecom lobbyist for years so I do NOT agree with this city bureaucrat's assessment. The other reason I did not speak out on this subject was because earlier in the class I challenged one of the speakers -- a County Government Manager -- when he said that my own Congressman John Kline made a mistake when he declared that he would "not seek nor accept legislative earmarks........."

This class session -- entitled "Local Government Day" -- only reinforced the fact for me that governments are simply in the business of growing their "business" at the taxpayers' expense. My current leadership class is my fourth experience with these "leadership development classes" which are sponsored by the chamber of commerce community. Clearly, there is a need for a variety of viewpoints to be supplied by speakers -- a variety of public policy thinking which we did not receive today.

Interested readers who want to explore how we can all work to limit government in our lives should visit these websites:

www.cagw.org
www.atr.org
www.cato.org
www.reason.org

I have several others to suggest so just let me know if you have questions.

Todd