Size Matters

After the Department of Defense, what government Department or Agency is the next largest?

Sometimes it feels like the IRS must be the largest department, given their omnipresence in our lives, but the IRS, which is part of the Treasury Department, is actually quite small compared to the leviathan that is the Veterans Affairs Department.

According to the Department of Labor, the Department of Veterans Affairs employed 280,000 people in the US in 2008 to service the needs of approximately 23.5 million vets (according to InfoPlease).  That's one employee for 84 vets. There are only 12 companies in the US that employ more people than Veterans Affairs.

Now don't get me wrong, I believe we owe a tremendous debt to those that committed themselves to protecting our freedoms and liberties.  I would even argue that a Vet is far more deserving of our support that a former elected official.

Do we really honor our Vets, though, by creating a beauracracy that slows the delivery of service, and thrives on making the simplest things complicated?  Is there a good reason that Vets should be forced to go to seperate facilities for health services?  What's next?  Will people on Medicare soon be forced into Medicare only facilities?

The larger a government organization gets, the more Common Sense challenged it becomes.  Just read this article about how the Veterans Affairs Department saw it as their place to violate the First Ammendment Rights of vets who were commemorating their own.  Why would any government employee even see it as their place to get involved?

Common Sense tells me that the needs of our vets would be so much better served by allowing the private sector to deliver top quality services, while being administered by a much smaller organization of a few hundred individuals who ensure that our funds are properly spent and that the services are accessible to those who have served so honorably.

Can it Really Be That Complicated?

On a recent trip to Washington DC, we chose to stay in Alexandria Virginia.  Our hotel was located just steps away from the very upscale office campus depicted in the picture below.

It turns out that this 2 million square foot, 4 building complex is the home of the US Patent and Trademark offices, and houses fewer than 10,000 employees.  Really?

When someone says patents to me, I picture some old building, smelling of 200 year old paper, with an inspector wearing a visor and coke-bottle eyeglasses, who makes marks with a pencil, and has a big stack of applications in front of him.

Obviously I am truly disconnected from reality.

At the end of 2009, there were 6,242 patent examiners in this complex.  The office grants approximately 150,000 patents per year.  Now, if my geriatric, bespectacled examiner was the one processing the paperwork, I would be impressed, but again, I am wrenched from my hopeful world view to the realization that each patent examiner ends up granting a patent once every 2 weeks.  Each examiner averages less than 26 patents a year.

In this day of modernization, it's ludicrous to me that our tax dollars would support the inefficiencies of an organization like this.  Two weeks to process a patent?  Seems to me that a person with an above average IQ could do a few LexisNexis searches and a bit of googling to determine the validity of an application.  But perhaps slow and steady wins the race, and protects the integrity of the patents granted?

Nope

Some of the patents granted by this slow moving group of comfortably lodged employees include the following examples cited in Wikipedia:

• U.S. Patent 5,443,036, "Method of exercising a cat", covers having a cat chase the beam from a laser pointer. The patent has been criticized as being obvious.
• U.S. Patent 6,025,810, "Hyper-light-speed antenna", an antenna that sends signals faster than the speed of light.
• U.S. Patent 6,368,227, "Method of swinging on a swing", issued April 9, 2002, was granted to a seven-year old boy, whose father, a patent attorney, wanted to demonstrate how the patent system worked to his son (aged 5 at the time of the application).
• U.S. Patent 6,960,975, "Space vehicle propelled by the pressure of inflationary vacuum state", describes an anti-gravity device and a perpetual motion machine.

If this organization were in private hands, and the cost of processing patents was exclusively borne by the applicants, there is no way that production of 1 patent every 2 weeks per examiner would be tolerated, let alone issuing a patent that describes how to exercise a cat with a laser pointer.

This is the type of government agency run amok that needs to be reigned in.

ROT1 (Rule of Thumb #1) – The Acid Test

From time to time we’ll blog about some of the foundational underpinnings of the sense we find so appealing.  We’ll call these Rules of Thumb (ROT).

Our first Rule of Thumb can be widely applied to business, family, or even the Federal Government.  The Acid Test asks a simple question.  If the answer is affirmative, then proceed with further investigation.  If the answer is negative, then stop.  Here’s the question:

“Do I have the right to take this action”

Notice that the question says nothing about ability.  Just because we can do something doesn’t mean that we should.  Let’s look at a couple of examples.

Let’s say I run a farm, but in order to get my crops in and make money, I need to hire people that I can take economic advantage of, due to some disadvantage they have (illegal aliens, criminal record, handicap, etc).  Could I do this?  Yes.  Do I have the right to do this?  No.

Let’s say I’m a really safe driver who’s never had (or caused) an accident.  Do I have the right to drive as fast as I want?  No

Rights are usually protected by or spelled out in laws.  The law that governs our government began with the Constitution, so when we have a question about whether the government has the right to do something, we should look to the Constitution for the answer.

Does the government have the right to collect money from the wealthy and redistribute it to those in need? It does not.  Should people be concerned with meeting the needs of those who are less fortunate?  Absolutely, but it should be done through avenues other than the government.

Should everyone have access to sound medical care?  Absolutely, but it is not the role of Government to do it.  It’s up to We the People, and the last time I looked at the Constitution, we never gave the government the responsibilities that they’ve taken. 

When you next hear about something that the governement wants to do, take a moment to ask the question "Do They Have The Right".  If the answer is no, then we give up our freedom and liberty by allowing it to happen.