Our Threatened Freedom

Is Law Enforcement Always Good

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Political Studies

Lesson: 119-169

Genre: Conversation

Track: 119

Dictation Name: Vol. J - Part 02 - Is Law Enforcement Always Good

Location/Venue: Unknown

Year: 1980’s – 1990’s

[Dr. Rushdoony] Is law enforcement always good? This is R.J. Rushdoony with a report on our threatened freedom.

Sometimes we taxpayers get a break. In 1980 Donald Lambro in ‘Fat City, How Washington Wastes Your Taxes’, listed 100 federal agencies which have been wasting our money. This list he made clear was not complete. The main function of these agencies to spend money and to provide bureaucratic jobs. The good news is that one of these, created in 1968, died on April 15, 1982, after spending nearly 8 billion dollars of our money. This agency was the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration. Like all such agencies, this one was given a good name, one designed to make criticism difficult. After all, who was against good law enforcement, or education, or wars against poverty, and so on? Usually however, the better sounding the cause is the worse the agency and its work. Free loading prospers best under a noble name. This was true of the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration. For example, over a half a million dollars were spent on a program to promote physical fitness among police officers. One of the ideas this project came up with was, as Lambro reported it, a desire to develop a Dick Tracy like wristwatch, so that police officers could obtain a quick reading of their blood pressure, temperature, and pulse, while on the go. With this kind of gadget maybe an officer in hot pursuit could ask to be relieved on the ground that his blood pressure and pulse rate had gone up.

Another project funded at 27,000 dollars was a study to determine why convicts want to escape from prison. You and I could have given the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration a bargain basement opinion on that, and saved the federal government some money.

The point is, however, when an agency thinks up subjects like that, it means that it is straining to find ways to spend the appropriated money, and to reward some sociologist with a grant of money.

Another study was financed to find out why people move out of neighborhoods where the crime rate is high.

People who take pay for producing such so called studies must now and then have some twinges of conscience, I hope, about what they are doing. Streetwalkers are at least honest about what they are.

Lambro said of the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration in 1980, quote, “There are a number of things wrong with this program, not the least of which is that it has had a difficult time spending its money.” Unquote. All kinds of silly subjects were studied in the name of law enforcement, delinquency programs, and other such noble sounding causes. Perhaps Congress killed the agency because it ran out of excuses for spending.

Well, Lambro tells us that there are at least 99 more such bureau’s that he can document as useless and wasteful. Maybe Congress even created some new ones to replace this one. One thing is sure. Washington is spending more money than in 1980 when Lambro wrote, and the jobless rate in Washington D.C., the lowest probably in the United States, is certainly not made up of civil service people.

Meanwhile it is good news that in this year of our Lord, one useless agency is dead. We can hope that many more will be finished off next year, before taxes finish off the rest of us.

This has been R.J. Rushdoony with a report on our threatened freedom.