We made it! by Walter Williams

From:
We made it! by Walter Williams

Whenever someone says that this or that government program is absolutely
necessary, I always wonder, "What did people do and how did they survive
before the program?"
If someone says food stamps are absolutely necessary for poor people's
survival, I wonder how America's millions of poor immigrants made it.
Unless I missed something, mass starvation is not a part of our history.
Was there a stealth food stamp program during the 1700s and 1800s?
Then there's the question: How did we manage to build the world's
greatest cities without the help of the 1965-created U.S. Department of
Housing and Urban Development? Did cities become worse off or better off
afterward? Or, how did we manage to produce energy to fuel the world's
richest economy before the 1977 creation of the Department of Energy?
Recently, I received an e-mail titled, "We Made It." It had to do with
the federal safety edicts of agencies like the U.S. Product Safety
Commission, established in 1972, and the U.S. Department of
Transportation, established in 1966. Congress created these and other
agencies to "protect the public against unreasonable risks of injuries
and deaths." That's how toys, cribs, child car seats and childproof
medicine bottles came to be regulated. Considering we were a nation for
nearly 200 years before Congress started protecting us against
"unreasonable risks of injuries and deaths," a natural question is how we
managed to survive and grow from a population of 4 million to the 280
million of us today.
According to my e-mail's author, if we listen to Washington, those of us
still around who were children during the '40s, '50s and '60s probably
should be dead. Nonetheless, there are 58 million of us born in 1945 or
earlier who are still kicking. Our parents allowed us to sleep in cribs
beautified with lead-based paint. They drove us around in cars that had
neither seatbelts nor airbags. They permitted us to ride our bicycles
without helmets, just as adults rode motorcycles without helmets. And,
horror of horrors, there were no childproof medicine bottles that, by the
way, are sometimes so difficult to open that some people summon their
children to open them.
The fact that these safety edicts saved some lives and prevented some
injuries doesn't provide justification for them any more than mandating
that, because some Americans have headaches, aspirin be put in the water
supply.
In a free society, government has the responsibility of protecting us
from others, but not from ourselves. Before government got into the
business of protecting us from ourselves, we did have a greater measure
of protection from others. Yesteryear's children rode their bikes or
walked to a friend's house, knocked on the door and let themselves in.
Many families didn't lock doors until the last family member was home for
the evening, and they did that in poor neighborhoods like the one I grew
up in.
Yesteryear, when we went off to school, parents might have worried about
our crossing streets safely. Today's parents have a different set of
worries, such as whether their child will be shot, stabbed, robbed, raped
or given drugs in school. During the pre-1960 years, neighborhoods -
including poor neighborhoods - were safe enough for women to walk the
streets after dark. In fact, in places like Harlem, N.Y., hot, humid
nights saw children and adults sleeping on fire escapes and rooftops.
Doing the same today might lead to arrest for attempted suicide.
Speaking of crime, if children did have a scrape with the law, our
parents sided with the police.
Don't you wonder how so many Americans made it without today's
oppressive, caring, nanny government?