Apparently I talk kind of loud when I’m out in public. While visiting the nearby Taco Bell, one of my associates made a comment critical of the role of government. Not one to be one-upped, I said something to my associate about private car company’s ability to make cars that can get you going down the highway at about 70 or 80 miles per hour, while government’s management of highways has you stalled in rush hour traffic. I was paraphrasing a quote I saw on the Libertarian Party of North Carolina’s website. Damn Libertarians and their quotations! Anyway, my comment was overheard by a fellow Taco Bell patron. She was visibly irked. I’d like to be the first person to say that irking someone didn’t bother me, but it did since I always want to be on good terms with all persons. However, ignorance irks me more.

The point of my diatribe was this:  Car companies do one thing — make cars. If they fail to do that one thing well, they would go out of business (well, at least if we had the benefits of free markets). Government doesn’t manage roads well because they do so many things — educate children, pick up the trash, advancing culture, enforcing immigration laws, stopping international terrorists, etc. I mean, if all government did was make roads, government would more than likely do a better job. The problem is that when you try to do so much and your scope is too broad, you fail to do anything well. This is an important takeaway from the science of project management.

A natural tendency would be to say “ah ha” and accept my position being correct as the end of the  story. It’s interesting though to wonder why this person may have been irked. I can only guess, because she chose to be irked and leave instead of saying something to me. First off, private companies — especially car companies — are targets now-a-days as prime examples of things not working. But the problem with a company like GM involves a number of issues, such as failure to understand the desires of customers, dilution of the brand with too many product sub-brand lines, agreeing to union contracts they could never support over the long haul, etc. Few (if any) of these problems deal with mass manufacturing and production of a product that more-or-less gets people where they want to be at fast speeds.

The only other issue that comes to mind is that she may have been a government worker. There are a lot of good people that I’ve known or worked with in government. I wouldn’t want to try painting all government employees with a single brush stroke since they are actually a diverse group. Some folks are pro-government because they have to be — they just happened to be interested in one of the fields government attempts to monopolize. Some are pro-government because they are simply acknowledging who butters their bread. Some people, understand what government is, does, and the unique rules government can make for itself to operate under, but are there just for the extreme job security. Governments typically claim morality for doing things like closing down libraries and turning a librarian with a Master’s degree in a specialized field like library science into a receptionist with fewer responsibilities (and the same pay grade to boot). Finally, there are those who believe in government on faith alone. They’ve been in “the Matrix” of government so long that they believe that government always existed, will endure forever, and is the only true force of good left in the universe. Government is God to these folks, but like any absolutist theology, facts are irrelevant.

It would have been good to have a conversation about my original Taco Bell commentary. It would have been good to hear why I was wrong, even though I’m pretty sure I’m not. At least I’m open to that idea.

I love being able to see a story discovered and researched right in front of my eyes. During the first day of the previously referenced investigative journalism workshop at the Civitas Institute, we did some investigation on the whereabouts of government aircraft. You would be amazed how many government-owned aircraft there are (especially by school districts), where they are stored, and what they are used for. Using publicly available online information, we found that state-owned airplanes were being used to take University of North Carolina officials to Georgia for a basketball tournament. This story made the local newspaper and those in the wrong were shamed into admitting their actions and making some level of restitution to the taxpayer. I love it and now feel decidely more empowered.

Besides having the opportunity to see real journalism and real results, I learned that traditional news sources can be sources for more in-depth research. Pick up a paper, find some building project that the government’s involved in, request public records, and see if anything’s out-of-place. Brilliant! This course of action won’t make you very many friends, and depending on what circles you’re involved with, friends may turn into enemies once sunlight’s applied to their actions. You may even be labeled a malicious blogger for focusing on negativity and conspiracies, as the mayor of Salisbury, Maryland, Barrie Parsons Tilghman, claimed in her farwell address. I wonder what she was involved in that made her a target? Hmmm, let’s find out…

Today I began a two-day investigative journalism workshop sponsored by Raleigh, North Carolina’s conservative Civitas think tank. The sessions were hosted by Texas Watchdog’s Trent Seibert and Carolina Journal’s Don Carrington. Seibert broke the story about Al Gore’s ungodly home electrical usage (and accompanying carbon footprint) while Carrington was instrumental in the uncovering of North Carolina debacles such as the Randy Parton Theater, so I feel I’m in good hands.

While I learned a lot of ways to get information about those in power, I think the biggest takeaway from this event was regarding the state of events in the journalism industry. For some reason, newspapers are closing throughout the country. Ostensibly it’s because people are getting their news whenever they want it for free online. The old business model no longer works. It occured to me, however, that the news in mainstream outlets like newspapers doesn’t really have the edge that makes it relevant any more. We have freedom of the press as a first amendment right because the press was meant to provide a check on those in power. If newspapers are cutting back on local investigations in favor of canned nationally-produced news stories from organizationally conservative corporate sources, why are newspapers even needed to advance freedom? Thus, bloggers and independent investigators pick up the slack and preserve a reason to have such freedoms. As long as bloggers are able to be perceived as journalists, move from opinion to actual investigation, raise their standards for research and reporting, and survive corporate and governmental powerbroker’s attempts to prevent such a development, freedom shall endure (at least in the written word).