Guest Post by Mark Nestmann
With an annual budget now approaching $4 trillion, it’s not surprising that the US government has quite a few departments that most of us know nothing about.
And with a budget deficit of $486 billion projected for 2015, you would hope that Congress is diligently striving to abolish agencies whose functions are no longer needed. Perhaps that’s what Congress had in mind in 1996, when it voted to disband the “Board of Tea Examiners.” For nearly a century, this group of tea tasters met twice a year to inspect tea to determine if it was of a high enough quality to be sold in the US. But for nearly two decades, US tea drinkers have somehow survived without it.
But many agencies with responsibilities just as esoteric as the Tea Board continue to exist, courtesy of US taxpayers. Take the Board on Geographic Names (BGN), for instance. This government agency performs the vital function of “maintaining uniform geographic name usage.” Only, it’s not doing a terribly effective job. Take my hometown of Charleston, West Virginia, for instance. If the BGN was doing its job, wouldn’t it make the other 40 cities named Charleston change their name to something else? After all, to avoid confusion, shouldn’t there just be just one Charleston?
While the BGN seems unlikely to foist any serious harm on the US, I can’t say the same about every obscure federal agency. A great example would be the “Raisin Administrative Committee” (RAC).
This intrepid bureaucracy, with an annual budget of around $5 million, came into being in 1949. It performs the indispensible task of administering a “price stabilization” program to ensure that raisin prices don’t fall too low. After all, we wouldn’t want to risk letting the free market decide how much raisins should sell for, would we? As we all know, bureaucrats do this job so much more efficiently than market forces ever could. For proof, just look at the glorious achievements of socialist economies like Cuba, Venezuela, Zimbabwe, and the former Soviet Union!
Continue reading “The Raisin Administrative Committee Strikes Back!”
