“Essential Services”

     The fires currently destroying Los Angeles have resurrected the old subject of “essential services.” Most Americans regard police protection, firefighting, and road maintenance as essential: the justification for the existence of state and local governments. Yet throughout this nation they’re the services most neglected by those governments. At the federal level, “essential services” would consist of national defense, border control, and perhaps freedom of travel. Yet the federal government neglects those things in favor of other, largely extra-Constitutional activities.

     But should anyone suggest an overall reduction in a government budget, how do the politicians and bureaucrats respond? Why, by attacking the “essential services,” of course! In 1975, when New York City was teetering on the brink of municipal default, and the federal government resisted suggestions that it should “bail out” the spendthrift city government, that government responded thus:

     When informed that cuts in jobs and in pay were inevitable, the municipal unions ran amok. It is only fair to say that Mayor Beame’s cuts in the summer of 1975, under the supervision of the Municipal Assistance Corporation (MAC), were deliberately inflammatory. They were calculated for the purpose of “proving” that the city needed state and federal aid. Beame dismissed nearly 5000 policemen and more than 2000 firemen (closing twenty-six firehouses) and fired nearly 3000 of the city’s 10,000 sanitation workers. The unions understood that this was an act of political blackmail. In June 1975 the firemen’s and policemen’s unions published a four page leaflet which they distributed to tourists. Titled “Welcome to Fear City,” with a lurid skeleton’s head on the cover, the pamphlet advised visitors to New York to stay indoors after 6 P.M., avoid public transportation, and, “until things change, stay away from New York if you possibly can.” In July the sanitation workers went on strike. They threatened to turn “Fear City” into “Stink City” and shouted from picket lines, “Wait till the rats come!”

     More recently, when the Obama Administration was faced with a partial government shutdown owing to Congress’s inability to pass a budget bill, it responded by idling the National Park Service and closing access to such landmarks as Mount Rushmore and the Washington Monument. Ironically, this political tactic of attacking what citizens value most to get additional funding for things we value least has long been known as the “Washington Monument Defense:”

     As tax receipts slip and budgets come under the knife in statehouses, city halls and private institutions, the region is witnessing the flowering of a kind of brinkmanship in which officials seek to protect their budgets by threatening to cut where the pain will be worst.
     The object of this exercise is not usually to perform the dire amputations that are threatened, budget experts say, but to arouse support for an agency’s strongest suit, usually the area in which it comes in contact with the public, and to deflect budget-cutting attention from more vulnerable, back-office operations with no public constituency.

     Hopefully, the post-mortems about the L.A. fires will include heavy public discussions of what the municipal government regards as “essential:”

     The City of Los Angeles cut funding for its fire department and allocated thousands of dollars to various progressive programs, including a “Midnight Stroll Transgender Cafe” and a Gay Men’s Chorus.
     Fires swept through Southern California on Wednesday, destroying hundreds of homes in Los Angeles County, and high winds only fueled the destruction. The Democratic mayor of Los Angeles, Karen Bass, was slammed for slashing the Los Angeles Fire Department’s (LAFD) budget by $17.6 million for fiscal year 2024 to 2025, Fox 11 reported, citing LA City Controller Kenneth Mejia.

     There are a lot of red faces already.

     Of course, threatening to choke off “essential services” to extort budget increases from a resistant legislature is an old topic. Even so, it comes back with a dreary frequency. Now and then, we get an unambiguous glimpse of the motivations behind the tactic. For instance, consider that federal “emergency management” workers deliberately obstructed private aid to the hurricane-ravaged districts in western North Carolina. They closed off access to that region by private aid workers, and seized privately donated relief supplies. What possible reason, other than maintaining federal control over the stricken residents of the region, could have been behind such a posture?

     That highlights the cleavage between what suffering Americans regard as “essential services” and the rather different position of the governments entrusted with providing them. “The needs of the State must come first, comrade. So sit down and shut up!”

     But – and you knew this was coming, Gentle Reader; don’t you dare deny it – what this tells us is who really does the good deeds, and who really provides the good things. It’s not government at any level. It’s your fellow Americans.

     If it’s truly the case that governments are an impediment to the provision of “essential services,” what does that say about government itself – government as a concept that requires justification in theory and defense in practice? How essential does government look to you?