75-16-A6
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Mr. Nader's Great Treasury Raid
TranscriptNewspaper columnist Pat Buchanan is back with me today with his viewpoint on a subject I think will interest you. He'll be right with you. Nearing final passage in the Congress today is a rather innocuous sounding bill calling for creation of a, quote, "Agency for Consumer Advocacy." The new agency is being promoted and portrayed as a vigorous new champion of consumer interests in the councils of government. It is nothing of the kind. What this new consumer protection agency is, is first and foremost, a political payoff to Ralph Nader. A 60 million dollar slice of federal pork being voted in gratitude by Mr. Nader's friends and debtors in the 94th Congress. Like all such federal agencies, the first beneficiaries will be the men who staff it and run it. These new GS-17s and 18s will be drawn from the friends and allies of Mr. Nader. They will exchange their current frugal existence in some tax-exempt haven for the power, perquisites, security and comforts of life on the federal payroll as 36,000 dollar a year bureaucrats, and it is the American taxpayer, the American consumer, who will be paying out of his pocket the cost of supporting these super bureaucrats in the style to which they are anxious to become accustomed. You are wrong, the consumer protection people say, this new agency unlike the established agencies will be free of influence by the so-called special interests. The claim is ludicrous. The new agency has already sold out to the special interests even before it was established. In order to get big labor support for the bill, Mr. Nader's allies in Congress cut a deal with the AFL-CIO, whereby all labor disputes are exempted from review by the new agency. But if labor settlements do not affect consumer interests, what in the world does? In the last analysis however, the new agency is a consumer fraud, because no single agency, no single individual, can possibly represent the interests of 210 million diverse Americans. When Americans go out to buy a car for example, they look for different things. Some look first at the mileage, others check it out for safety features and for weight for long distance driving, others are interested in styling and comfort, others want the cheapest possible transportation for the lowest possible cost, some want the prestige of a foreign model, others wouldn't buy anything that wasn't made in the United States. How in the world can any single agency, any single individual, possibly represent these conflicting interests? The answer of course, is that the new consumer protection agency would not be representing what the consumers of America want, it would represent what Mr. Nader and his friends think they should want. There's one common consumer interest however on which most Americans do agree. That is, that we already have too much government and too much bureaucracy. The last thing this country needs now in 1975 is new taxes to hire new bureaucrats in a new agency to make sure that the other bureaucrats in the older agencies are doing their job. If the 94th Congress wants to pay off its political debts to Mr. Nader, let it find some less expensive way. This is Pat Buchanan, substituting for Ronald Reagan. Thanks for listening. |
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