The investigators

An old question that keeps coming back

IT’S A simple question as old as Plato’s Republic, in which he proposed that a committee of wise guardians be entrusted the affairs of the government so that the mere people, the despised Demos, wouldn’t get in the way. But the same old question kept arising—just as it did last week when the Arkansas Legislative Council met to investigate and expose the performance of its own Joint Performance Review, which turned out to be a mix of under-reforming and over-spending.

Here the committee was going to go after all manner of scandals in state government, like how the Department of Human Services keeps shifting the children in its “care” all around, but it turns out the committee itself is as scandalous. Naturally the immediate response of the guardians was not to guard at all but, as usual, to spend even more. It seems legislators who are not members of the committee are showing up at meetings of the committee to collect their perdiem pay, including mileage to and from the state capital. (Most of them get $150 per day plus mileage.) One state rep, Andy Davis of Little Rock, did dare suggest that rarest and wisest of corrective steps: Stop spending! Oh, a Daniel come to judgment! Unfortunately, countered by the usual crowd of spenders whose response is always the same: keep shelling out even more of the state’s money.

You can depend on Little Rock’s Joyce Elliott, state senator and big spender (of other people’s money) to come up with her standard response: Delay, pass the buck to some other committees and generally evade the essential issue: how to save the people some money. That may be a problem for us with our own household budgets, but never for such public servants. Even the Republican Speaker of the House, Jeremy Gillam of Judsonia, advised having the committee do nothing but put off any decisions. (“I think there are some things they could do internally where they wouldn’t have to come back and ask for so much next year.”)

And so it goes. Just as the people’s hard-earned money does.