MISSOURI WATCH: WHEN LESS OFTEN MEANS MORE

If average citizens, folks like us, were asked to describe their idea of good government, many would respond that it should be less rather than more, economical rather than wasteful, responsive rather than diffident. And that's not a bad definition of good governance and pretty much as it was viewed by America's founding fathers more than a couple of centuries ago.

The problem with nurturing good government is that less generally becomes more, economy turns to wastefulness and responsiveness often turns to permanence. A couple of decades ago, state and federal legislative bodies thought they had found the cure for the transition from good to bad, and they began enacting so-called "sunshine laws" with great abandon. Such measures became the hula-hoops of the 1970s, a kind of legislative fad that promised a quick cure, not unlike the "new federalism" of the 1980s and the plan to end our disgust with politicians by enacting term limits in this decade.

Like all fads, the sunshine laws that promised a review of a program's performance after two or three years proved unworkable for a very simple reason: we citizens grew to like the benefits of new programs and by the time our elected representatives were to review the results, we demanded that they be continued. Oftentimes, we demanded even more: we wanted them enlarged to include a broader constituency.

Take federal food stamps. This particular project was the brainchild of a Missouri congresswoman, the Honorable Leonor Sullivan, a splendid, caring and gracious lady from St. Louis who was elected to the Congress following the death of her husband, John Sullivan. It was Mrs. Sullivan's contention that America's farm surpluses could be put to excellent use to solve several nasty problems, including disposal of numerous crops and commodities that, produced in excess, served to depress prices paid to farmers, while solving a problem that was embarrassing to a country that liked to boast it was the world's wealthiest nation, namely millions of hungry citizens.

A federal program that began with the distribution of the actual surplus commodities eventually was transformed into a more efficient system through food vouchers, aka stamps. By making this program more efficient, we also made it more wasteful, since the efficiency reduced the hassle of throwing great hunks of cheese and butter from the back end of a truck to the more efficient method of mailing stamps to recipients at the start of every month. Less became more, efficiency turned to wastefulness and responsiveness soon turned to dependency.

Today, food stamps are an integral part of Missouri's welfare system, with a constituency that has doubled every 10 years, and to propose its end in this century is out of the question. The food stamp proliferation has reached a level never ever remotely considered by Mrs. Sullivan and her small, dedicated band of congressional allies, and the same can be said for scores of other social programs that today are permanent fixtures in our state and federal capitals.

I'm not advocating the end of food stamps, for they have served the deserving well and have become essential for dietary stability for millions of young boys and girls across the country, but the ultimate outcome of this particular program is illustrative of hundreds of others just like it. Whether the program is Social Security, which over the years has been expanded to include children with undesirable behavioral patterns, or national security, which has become a means of maintaining huge contracts for military equipment that will never be used, our society has sanctioned not less but more.

Legislators who arrive in Jefferson City, after pledging to downsize government, often find themselves voting for more government and at greater and greater cost. Was there a legislative candidate from Greene County who ran on a platform of rejecting state funds for a stadium where a minor league baseball might perform? Was there a lawmaker from Kansas City who told voters it was time for them to begin supporting their own public schools rather than depend on state largesse? Was there an outstate candidate who pledged that he would vote against all new programs including those that would benefit his own district? If any of these candidates were around during the campaign, they were retired by voters on election day.

We only want less when there is no more to be gained from government programs that over-respond to public needs.

~Jack Stapleton is a Kennett columnist who keeps tabs on government.