GETTING THE GOVERNMENT OUT

Privatizing Federal Spending: A Strategy to Eliminate the Deficit by the Heritage Foundation's S. M. Butler (Universe Books, hdbd., 186pp., $14.95) is not another one of the books to get tiresome) explaining why the private sector is better at running civilian services than the government; it actually proposes a method of achieving the transfer. Economists Stroup and Baden (whom we have been watching since Nov. 81) have noted that the Sierra Club has oil and gas wells on one of its bird sanctuaries; they suggest giving public lands to environmentalists organizations, who will look after them better and lose their anti-industrial animosity. Butler generalizes this proposal to other fields and hopes this will also build new political constituencies and ruin the old coalitions. I welcome a how-to book in this field, for it has little or no competition.

But thereafter my enthusiasm begins to flag. It's all a bit too simple. Environmentalists, for example, are not motivated by environmentalism alone. And the US Postal Service Butler implies, can be privatized by buying off its rural customers (who would pay much more than urban clients) -- but what about the political muscle of 700,000 overpaid, unfireable employees and their families?

Like many political scientists and economists, Butler pays little attention to technology. The large constituency of the stage coaches and canals was not killed by politicking, but by the railroads; and the large constituency of the railroads was killed by the automobile. The Postal Service has already proved incapable of handling electronic mail (as Butler notes), and what will make it obsolete is not a passel of privatized bureaucracies (alone), but laser light, fiber optics and the home computer. They will eventually enable anyone to communicate with anyone else, by voice or permanent record, directly (with fewer routing connections than for a local call today), for long distance lines will have virtually unlimited capacity. Technology is not everything, but neither is it nothing.

The topic of the current high school debate is the establishment of a national policy to protect the quality of water in the US, and Bettina B. Greaves has complied an engrossing 109-page anthology of articles dispelling myths about both water and government, Water Quality and Property Rights ($4 from FEE, Irvington-on-Hudson, NY 10533). It is less ambitious and wide-ranging than Butler's book, but it is packed with highly readable and not at all obvious material, and I love it without reservations.