KEEP ON SHOUTING!
We have just finished reading a manuscript which was prepared especially for SURPLUS RECORD—it will cover the preliminary report of the Commission on Organization for the Executive Branch of the Government, otherwise known as the Hoover Commission. The Hoover Report contains 1353 pages of printed matter and represents more than eighteen months of investigation and preparation.
The article covering this report was written by Gordon Trist Burke in his typical style, which is well known to most SURPLUS RECORD readers. It will make your hair curl to read the facts and figures which Mr. Burke dug out of this report. Here are only a few of the ridiculous and incompetent things which have been going on during the past decade or so:
Did you know that there are 1816 separate federal bureaus, administrations and agencies?
Did you know that they actually occupy 45,000 offices whose total floor space approximates that of 140 Empire State Buildings?
Did you know that the number of people on government payrolls is greater than the individual population of twenty-seven of our states?
Did you know that there is one civilian employee in each of our armed forces for every two men in uniform?
Did you know that the Panama Railroad, which is only fifty-nine miles long, employs 7,250 people?
When we say this story will make your hair curl, that is putting it mildly. The whole situation is fantastic but true.
Let’s take a look at this situation from the point of view of the average business man, who occasionally comes in contact with a federal bureau. We all have to report to the Treasury Department and, of course, there is the Social Security. Every ten years a census taker comes around. There is the Post Office Department, the Federal Reserve Bank, the Department of Commerce and a number of other agencies with which we are all fairly familiar and which perform a service for the public. But if you were to eliminate the few agencies with which we are acquainted, there would still remain over 1800 separate bureaus that are living off our tax dollars.
Everyone is wondering what has happened to business, but we don’t think that it takes a very great stretch of imagination to put a finger on the main cause for the present recession. Everyone we know is fed up with taxes, with paying through the nose for everything he tries to do, with inefficiencies of labor, and to top it all off, with the star-gazing opinions given out by many of our high-positioned government officials. The day of free enterprise is gradually becoming a thing of the past. The incentive for creating an enterprise has been taken away and one can only lay it to the bamboozling and boondoggling which has confronted us for so many years.
Not so long ago some one asked up what we were going to do about it and our answer is, and will continue to be, to KEEP ON SHOUTING ABOUT IT. And the more shouting that is done by each and every one of us, the sooner this whole chaotic situation will be corrected.
