-->Milwaukee's Mess
by Christopher Westley
[Posted June 14, 2004]
Perhaps you have heard that the bureaucrats running the Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage District recently dumped 4.6 billion gallons of raw sewage into Lake Michigan along the Wisconsin coast. What's more, they did it as a matter of policy.
That you probably haven't heard about this scandal says much about the sycophantic relationship between the public sector and the so-called free press in this first decade of the 21st century[1], showing that press coverage is lacking in other areas than simply its coverage of Iraq. It also indicates much about the degree to which the public sector is held to a lower standard than the private sector, a relation which is true, to varying degrees, throughout the United States, but especially in that birthplace of the Progressive Era, the Peoples Republic of Wisconsin.
I know about this scandal because of a recent trip to that state. You can't walk along the lake there without covering your nose and wondering if you are endangering your health. The beaches along the lakefront—always a popular destination during Memorial Day weekend—were closed. From what I could tell, the locals are mad as hell about the situation and are completely unable to do anything about it, so entrenched are the perpetrators of this crime.[2]
How could this happen? The answer is a textbook case that could have fit well as an appendix to Ludwig von Mises's Bureaucracy.
Mehr im Link.
<ul> ~ http://www.mises.org/fullstory.asp?control=1538</ul>
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