By: Jay Ambrose

Look at an enlarged photo of one of them, and yikes! Bedbugs are ugly.

The bigger deal will be when they dine on your flesh, thereby memorializing a spectacular comeback and providing some spectacular signals, to boot.

And what are they signals of, these saliva-injecting, blood-sucking, itch-inducing, eyes-protruding, millimeter-measured mini-monsters staging a national invasion of hotels and homes after a half-century’s virtual absence?

Just this — that government interventionism has gone maniacal, that human advancement is being undone as human freedoms are rolled back and that our self-supposed superiors are forever making our lives worse in the name of making them better.

All of this and more was put in elucidating perspective recently in a Colorado Springs talk by Jeffrey Tucker, an economist with the Ludwig von Mises Institute who noted that once upon a time the purpose of so-called progressives was to enhance humanity’s material well being.

They seldom if ever enhanced anything, but at least the cause was more justifiable than the one that began emerging with John Kenneth Galbraith’s book “The Affluent Society,” in 1958.

Galbraith was well past the indefensible notion that capitalism made anyone poorer. It didn’t. It did the opposite, and we therefore had a new problem.

Wealth. Or as he put it, materialism and consumerism, dread afflictions visited upon us by productivity and rising living standards and all those other moral encumbrances of free exchange.

Americans were soon to learn of even more discomfort with all that’s comforting. After Galbraith came environmentalism.

“Now poverty was the goal” of progressives, said Tucker as he observed that civilization is defined by such achievements as clean homes, the pickup of garbage that would otherwise spread disease and the money to fund concerts and churches.

Because people around the world pursued objectives of this kind, their numbers increased from 500 million five centuries ago to 7 billion today. Sadly, however, governments especially inspired by environmentalist trepidation keep devising restrictions and mandates to scoot us in the direction of hunter-gatherer days.

All of which brings us back to bedbugs. They were practically eliminated in this country 50 years ago by the pesticide DDT.

But DDT itself was practically eliminated with a U.S. ban after Rachel Carson’s book, “Silent Spring,” mistakenly made it out be many times as dangerous to wildlife and people as careful study has shown it was.

DDT was not only effective in killing bedbugs, but also mosquitoes that carry the malaria virus sickening people worldwide, Tucker said.

As someone who has studied the issue, I can vouch that the disappearance of DDT significantly reduced the means for protecting the lives of Third World inhabitants and condemned many to painful deaths.

One estimate puts the toll for children at 20 million, and the only excuse has been the remote possibility of risks some scientists dismiss as all but nonexistent.

Though indoor spraying of DDT is still badly needed in Africa, it is not the central issue.

Bedbugs may even be resistant to it at this point, Tucker said. What matters more in ways large and small is that governmental “interventions subvert the capacity to civilize our world.”

Government, said Tucker, is the only thing in the world that kills more people than insects.

Private property is the only rescue from poverty, he told the audience, and freedom is what gave us civilization. Government too often just gets in the way, as it is now doing with rules about kinds of light bulbs you may soon no longer buy, about pointless recycling that complicates the crucial task of garbage removal or even about showerheads that reduce water pressure.

He says we take our civilization so much for granted now that government thinks it can trample on precious accomplishments without consequence when, in fact, its interfering deeds are “the enemies of all that makes life grand.”

Something to think about when the bedbugs bite.

Jay Ambrose is former Washington director of editorial policy for Scripps Howard newspapers He can be reached at SpeaktoJay@aol.com.