Name 10 things the government does well

A dear friend of mine left a challenge in a comment.  Here ’tis:

Other than the military, can you name 10 things that the government has done really well, better than the private sector?

It’s an important question, for skepticism toward all government (rather than reform of bad government) is not only common, but at the root of a couple of major political outlooks.  And because it’s important, it seemed worth a post of its own.

Here’s my quick response. Maybe you can do better:

You betcha. Off the top of my head, I’ll give you twenty, most of which are under-funded for the work they do:

1. The FAA. Crashes are a rarity here, thanks to equipment safety tests and massively successful air flight controlling.
2. Medicaid: private sector insurance companies make money by ditching their customers when they get very sick. Medicaid picks up the castoffs.
3. Social Security: What if Mr. Bush had succeeded in privatizing SS before the markets crashed? Can you imagine how many old people would be working at WalMart, since their SS would have been cut in half? And did you know that before SS, thousands of older Americans simply starved to death?
4. SCHIP: Healthcare insurance for children who would not otherwise have it – enormously preventive of school absence, long-term illness, loss of physical and mental development
5. The CDC: How do we know that the virulence of H1N1 is less than expected? Who is telling the world that US pork is safe to eat? How do we know whether an illness is H1N1 or not? It’s all the CDC.
6. School hot lunch programs: For many children, their only serious nutrition all day every day. What industry would do it?
7. The Soil Conservation Service: though bureaucratic, there is no private industry comparable. How vastly different would America be without the wetlands your dad and a thousand like him have created.
8. Head Start: kids from homes that have seriously dysfunctional emotional and learning environments have benefited enormously
9. The Department of Motor Vehicles: how many mistakes have you had on your car registrations or titles?
10. E911 commissions: how long does it take an ambulance or fire truck to reach you if a child who can call 911 can’t tell the operator an address? When I first came to Washington, there was simply no way to know. People died.
11. University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics – known around the world for ground-breaking medical research.
12. Open meetings laws for city, county, and state government office – nothing like it at all in the private sector. But if public officials make decisions without notifying us, they can get in big trouble.
13. Free public libraries – which most nations simply don’t have.
14. Public health services – how many lives have been saved by free or low-cost immunizations? Show me something analogous in the private sector.
15. The Interstate Highways Commission: we enjoy the best auto and truck transportation system in the world.
16. The FDIC: how safe is your bank account? Prior to the FDIC, if your bank got greedy and lent more than it could support, you lost your life savings.
17. The FDA: how do I know that the Adderall I take is really Adderall, and really the dosage I’m told? Much of the world does not. The FDA constantly catches businesses attempting to cheat.
18. The Federal Elections Commission: A missionary friend of mine tells me that Africans are utterly astonished at the speed and accuracy with which US elections take place, and the efficiency and safety with which the US changes its administrations.
19. Uniform Building Codes: my son works for a concrete contractor, and can tell you with confidence that there are pre-code homes in our town (and probably in every town) that have sewer lines that run under the park and dump raw sewage into the creek that flows into the trailer court.
20. NASA – what business has landed on the moon?
21. The University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop (Excuse me for going to 21 – thoughts are still coming!) – one of the premiere writing teaching centers in the whole world. Only a handful do it as well.

Worth thinking about, eh?  What can you add? [Click the comments line at the top of the post]