Every so often we get a new symbol of government waste - the $200 hammer, the $5,000 toilet seat, the $3,500 spatula. Granted, there is no evidence the government has paid $3,500 for a spatula yet, but I have no doubt the Pentagon has not only commissioned a "liquefied ovian spheroid manipulator" but also paid too much for it.
These items serve two useful purposes: One, they hone our distaste at the bloat and the waste; two, they distract us from the really wasteful things that suck up billions and produce nothing but satisfied civil servants. To the list of distractions, you may now add Al Gore's ashtray.The veep, who is in charge of reinventing government, has taken the ashtray as a symbol of what's wrong with government today. He likes to wave about the 10 pages of specifications, as he did in Tulsa at the governors' convention.
He notes with indignation that the government demands that manufacturers test the ashtrays by breaking them and counting the fragments - no more than 35, none of which is smaller than 6.4 millimeters. You get the idea that the government has built huge ashtray-colliders in the Texas desert.
All well and good; no one can say that this makes sense.
But it does raise a question. Where was Al Gore on this matter before?
Why, busy in the Senate, drafting reams of necessary legislation.
And what does legislation produce?
Specifications. An endless series of details, each of which requires more government workers to oversee compliance. When it comes to handing your money over to government, Senator Gore was tireless. Now, after a lifetime of shoving wads of money into the slobbering maw of Jabba the Fed, he discovers that government is not efficient and needs reinventing.
But let us assume that he is sincere in his conversion. There still would be reasons to doubt the usefulness of this enterprise. The Republicans, who hate government, had 12 years to reinvent it and failed. Ideological fervor hit the brick wall of politics.
The trouble is having the Democrats reinvent government. It's sort of like having an obsessed lover draft the restraining order. Democrats depend on civil service constituencies - large blocs of voters whose job it is to draft, proof and print ashtray regulations. Democrats depend on members of the Ashtray Testers Local 309.
If Al Gore reinvents Al Gore, we might get somewhere. What if he learns that children were successfully educated before the Department of Education was established? And that agriculture was widely practiced before the USDA?
More likely, Al Gore will not reinvent government. He will reinforce it. In a way, a more efficient government is worse than an inefficient one: At least the latter takes longer to get around to doing what it shouldn't.