It’s very fashionable right now to speak out against ‘Blig Government’, but exactly what does that mean?  Well, the American Thinker posted an article today that really shows the damage a well-meaning federal bureaucracy can do.

During the Great Depression, farmers simply walked away from their farms and left the land untended.  In the midwest and prairie states, the untilled soil was picked up and carried by winds and the area became known as the Dust Bowl. 

The article at American Thinker picks up the story:

“After a triumphant election, the newly sworn in President Franklin Roosevelt set forth on an aggressive policy push known as the First Hundred Days to create policy and programs known collectively as the New Deal.  Among these was the Soil Erosion service, formed under the authority of the Department of the Interior in 1933.  The SES attempted to address the growing crisis surrounding the erosion of the nation’s soil.  Reorganized in 1935, the SES was handed over to the Department of Agriculture, where it began to actively take on the disaster.”  

The Soil Erosion Service decided that the answer to the erosion problem was an Asian ornamental plant known as Kudzu.  The article reports:

“…but they did not think of the ramifications that mass planting would have on local ecosystems.  The Department of Agriculture used the Civilian Conservation Corps to distribute and plant the seeds.  Over a period of ten years, one hundred million kudzu seeds were planted, mostly in the South.  The government even bribed farmers to plant kudzu at eight dollars per acre.  By the end of the program, 46 million acres of kudzu had been planted.”

Anyone who has driven through the southern part of the United States has seen the devastation this program has caused.  The article reports:

“Kudzu can cover a large area in a small amount of time.  It can destroy an entire forest–and regional timber industries–in a few short years.  The vine grows over the trees and other underbrush, smothering everything under its weight.  Kudzu also causes headaches for telecommunications and electric companies, whose poles are snapped or shorted out by the vine.  Farmland covered in kudzu by the U. S. government has been permanently lost, to say nothing of the millions of dollars wasted.  Just how bad is the spread of kudzu?  Each year it spreads an additional 150,000 acres.  To date, kudzu covers around 10,000 square miles in the United States.  To put it in perspective, the area lost to kudzu is roughly the same size as the state of Massachusetts.”

These are the people who are going to be in charge of our medical care?  I hope not.