In my small town of fourteen-thousand, in rural Wisconsin, we have both the seasonal inconvenience of too much snow and the year-round inconvenience of planning and scheming bureaucrats.
There are differences of scale between the municipal meddling that afflicts us and that afflicting big cities like Atlanta or Los Angeles. We’re not an over-taxed, over-regulated big city; we’re an over-taxed, over-regulated small town. We’ve not the burden of bureaucrats wasting hundreds of millions of tax dollars and public debt on municipal projects; we’ve the burden of bureaucrats wasting tens of millions of tax dollars and public debt on municipal projects.
Why not pit one problem against another? Let’s have scheming bureaucrats and politicians do what they do best, to address the problem of too much snow in Whitewater: Why don’t they just ban snow?
Over at the Washington Examiner, Sam Ryan proposes exactly that course for Washington, D.C., in a parody entitled, “Parody — Resolved that Snow is Hereby Banned.”
(Presumably, Ryan prefaced the word parody in front of the essay as part of the parody, suggesting that some federal legislators would need to be told his parody was, in fact, a parody. That’s probably doubly necessary in a place like Whitewater.)
Here’s an excerpt from Ryan’s proposal:
As our nation’s capital recovers from yet another massive blizzard, the problem of unregulated snow can no longer be ignored. It’s time for Congress to set limits on the crystalline mayhem that descends through the atmosphere wreaking havoc on all hard-working Americans.
Certainly, snow-control legislation would require political willpower and bipartisan support. But if today’s policy-makers cannot put an end to snow storms, none of us will escape these boom-and-bust blizzards that undermine the foundations of our nation’s growth and prosperity.
Consider the facts.
Local governments — particularly plow crews — cannot deal with snow effectively. Weatherpersons “predict” snow, but don’t do anything about it….
In short, everything grinds to a halt….
The bigger problem, of course, is the practical one. Regulating precipitation — or even banning snow entirely — won’t actually stop snow from falling. Virtually all meteorologists agree that — given certain atmospheric conditions — snow will continue to fall from the sky regardless of any federal law.
Although this may seem like an intractable problem, there is a simple solution. Congress should create a special committee — comprised of a blue-ribbon panel of experts (with at least one labor representative) — to study the problem and submit recommendations four years hence, at which time a more effective law could be passed.
The committee — and its various subcommittees — could be funded by a penny-per-shovel tax. Some might argue that taxing shovels could actually exacerbate the snow problem by discouraging Americans from buying them. However, this problem can also be fixed through legislation.
Congress could simply mandate that that all Americans purchase shovels. Yes, there would need to be a carve-out for Alaskans who already own shovels, and perhaps a Medicaid-style program for those who cannot afford shovels. But those are minor details that could be worked out in conference committee.
Why not a local ordinance and task force modeled on this proposal? We have ample precedent for regulating anything that moves, and quite a few things that don’t. We’re well-familiar with task forces and ad hoc committees that do nothing but doing nothing.
One more law and one more ordinance wouldn’t be a departure for Whitewater, Wisconsin, but rather continuation of a longstanding local habit.