CONSEQUENCES OF GOVERNMENT FAILURE

Talk to any small business person or farmer across Missouri, and you're liable to hear one discouraging message: increasingly, he or she considers government to be the enemy of lawful, productive, job-creating enterprise. Is that too harsh? I don't think so. You should know that not a day goes by that I don't think about this subject, and about how this alarming trend can be combatted, and how, during my brief tenure in state government, I might be an instrument of its reversal.

As government grows ever larger, arbitrary, capricious and even ludicrous rules pile upon each other. Pesky inspectors and know-it-all regulators get hired by all the various departments and sent forth to do their thing. One is reminded of the stirring words Thomas Jefferson used in the Declaration of Independence to justify armed colonial defiance of and the making of war against the British crown. The Declaration ringingly challenged King George III, declaring that "He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent forth swarms of Officers to harass our people and eat out their substance."

Again, is that too harsh? I don't think so. Consider:

* A visit this week with Bootheel cotton producers reveals that state Department of Natural Resources (DNR) inspectors recently descended on managers of a cotton gin, snooping around the premises. The inspectors' message: gin owners would be fined $10,000. Their offense? The erection of a shed that DNR bureaucrats had not previously approved.

* A Perry County timber producer receives a visit from the lovely people at the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). After concluding their inspection, the nervous owner, a risk-taker whose spunk and hard work have created dozens of jobs, is informed that he will face a fine of $750. His offense? An extension cord was used to power a hand saw to cut lumber. The bewildered timber man is at a loss to understand how this was in the slightest degree "unsafe." Paying the fine is cheaper than fighting it, so pay up he does.

* A southeast Missouri entrepreneur in the trash hauling business seeks to permit a new landfill. Complying with all DNR regulations, he hires a leading geological engineer from UM-Rolla and begins the years-long process. Together, they locate a site with the requisite soils, far from habitation, and drill more than a dozen wells, up to 180 feet in depth, at a cost in the middle six-figures. The soils test out; the geologist is satisfied. DNR, however is not. Its inspectors demand of the trash hauler that he drill another half-dozen wells at a cost of another $120,000.

The owner balks at the expense piled on staggering expense; meanwhile, illegal, roadside trash dumping becomes ever more common. Call it an Unintended Consequence of zealous environmental regulation.

As government assumes duty after duty that 30 or 40 years ago no one would have dreamed it should possess, increasingly it fails in its most fundamental and vital function: the protection of the lives, safety and property of its people.

Urban government schools that spend untold billions but too often fail to teach children how to diagram a sentence, or which country borders the United States across the Rio Grande, or in which century the Civil War was fought, now inform dismayed parents even over their strenuous objections that their children will receive instruction in the placement of a condom on a banana. In St. Louis last month, students at Beaumont High School were told by teachers to "run for their lives" when marauding gangs temporarily took over the place. Taxpayers are told that no money exists to build new prisons to hold vicious criminals, but that their tax dollars will be used to pay for abortion on demand throughout the entire, nine-months of pregnancy.

Increasingly, our citizens are so fearful for their lives that this past week saw an extraordinary debate in the Missouri Senate: a debate on the right of Missourians to carry a concealed weapon. Regardless of your views on the matter, the very fact that this debate occurs at all carries a clear message: Americans know that their government is failing to protect them, to maintain order, and they seek, increasingly, to take the matter into their own hands.

In the most agonizing vote I have cast since taking office 14 months ago, I voted "aye" on the right to "conceal and carry" a weapon. (It lost, 18-15.) For me, the clincher in a debate on which many good points were made on both sides was when my roommate, a senator from St. Charles, offered the tale of five women who teach in his district. They are pursuing masters' degrees by taking night courses at St. Louis University. Night after night, they travel down to the parking lot, arriving after dark. They go to class, perhaps also to the library. Returning to their cars at 9:30 or 10:00 p.m., they head back to the parking lot. They informed my colleague, "Each of us carries a pistol in her purse. Please, Senator: make legal what we're already doing."

A government busy doing 50 million things it has no business doing is failing in its most fundamental responsibility: the protection of the lives, safety and property of the people. That's why the week of March 7 saw a debate on the right of Missourians to carry a concealed weapon.