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Show Farm Protest Gets Results By HARLEY L. LUTZ r Professor of Public Finance, Princeton University The Department of Agriculture has recently announced a reorganization Df the agencies that had been created, to supervise and regiment the farmers hi under the agricultural agri-cultural legislation. legisla-tion. The purpose pur-pose was said to be that of expediting ex-pediting the services to the public. It is well known that this announcement was not spontaneous. spon-taneous. It was a last-minute defensive move against the rising ris-ing tide of agri-cultural agri-cultural com-olaint com-olaint and od- doubt that the failure to rectify It is not to be attributed to the refusal of Congress to enact the kind- of reorganization reor-ganization bill that was offered in the last session. The action now announced an-nounced by the Department of Agriculture Agri-culture reveals that what is needed is not so much a new law but a new point of view. The needed viewpoint is not really new. It is, in fact, an old. though fundamental one, which now seems new only because it has come to be so completely disregarded. It is the simple principle that government exists ex-ists to perform certain services for the people in the most efficient and economical eco-nomical manner possible. Had this principle been of controlling influence influ-ence no agrarian revolt would have been necessary to inspire the administrative admin-istrative changes now belatedly to be made in order to expedite the giving of service in ths instance. The episode reveals something else. It is that since bureaucracy can be induced to mend its ways only by citizen citi-zen protest, the time has come for more protests. We need a citizen revolt re-volt against the steady increase of taxation tax-ation and against the further piling up of the mountain of public debt. Most of all we need a citizen revolt against the wasteful spending policy that is forcing the rise of tax rates and the crushing increase of public debt. If the only way to direct official attention at-tention to the opportunities for improving im-proving the public service and for reducing re-ducing its cost is by using the ax, then the ax should be used. Bureaucracy has little internal capacity, and no internal in-ternal desire, to purge itself. Fortunately, the country has not, as yet,. moved so far toward the totalitarian totali-tarian state as to make protest impossible impos-sible as it now is elsewhere. Unless the people exercise their right of protest pro-test and criticism, however, it is likely like-ly to lapse through non - use. The farmers have done all of us an excellent excel-lent service by speaking out. It is now up to the taxpayers to follow their lead position under a scheme which, despite the camouflage, camou-flage, applied so thoroughly the viewpoint view-point and policy of the dictatorship states. In this episode there is more involved than farm relief. The fact that a sector of the federal bureaucracy is to be redesigned so as to expedite service to the public is of universal significance. It should be noted that this decision was made only after the beneficiaries o the service had expressed, in vigorous terms, their dissatisfaction with the previous arrangement. Naturally this raises the query why did the bureaucrats wait until a storm of protest had arisen before be-fore deciding to make changes which would expedite their services? The answer is that the expeditious performance per-formance of service is not the goal of bureaucracy. Prompt, efficient, and it may. be added, economical service, is never the primary aim of bureaucratic bureau-cratic administration. Rather the aim is the evolution and elaboration of red tape, the creation of useless jobs, and the steady enlargement of the bureaucratic bureau-cratic power and prestige. There can be no question that the condition revealed in this one instance la widespread. Nor can there be any |