WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. — The whole country was so involved in World War II that war news distracted Americans even from things like the deaths of washed-up singers.
We endured inconveniences. Gasoline, tires, shoes, coffee and sugar were rationed. Travel was difficult. There were places you couldn't go and products you couldn't buy. When anyone complained, we would chant, "There's a war on, moron!"
If you had offered the thought that a new coat of paint on the old picket fence was a better use of money than more airplanes to defeat Hitler and Tojo, you would have been odd, if not weird. That may be why it struck me as strange when President George Bush the Younger, in the middle of two wars, used to say that we can spend our money better than the government can.
As I noted a few months ago, the government would have had to mess up pretty badly to spend money worse than the smart, rich people who gave theirs to Bernard Madoff. But now I think I found an illustration of the superiority of private spending to wasteful taxes.
For most of this decade, the government gave Mexico $40 million a year to keep their drugs out of our country. You know how well that worked.
The Mexican drug cartels grew strong. They have taken to shooting one another and strangers. The Mexican government complains that the cartels get their guns north of the border. It calls gunrunning Mexico's No. 1 security problem.
Our Government Accountability Office says the Mexicans have a gripe. By one count, 90 percent of guns seized from the cartel there came from the United States. It's hard to buy guns in Mexico.
Our law enforcers, according to the GAO, say they are hobbled in chasing gunrunners by our National Rifle Association-given constitutional right to have guns. That right might be lost if the border agents could trace the Americans who act as straw purchasers for the cartel. If they could find the cartel's buyers, Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi could find you.
The NRA points out that studies of the origins of the guns in Mexico are few and not perfect. And the cartels have enough money to buy guns anywhere on Earth, although no place on Earth do they love more sincerely and find more convenient than the United States.
The situation puts angry, Southwestern Americans in a slightly inconsistent position. They demand that Mexico keep its dad-gummed people from coming north without permission. But, as for our guns going south without their permission? Mexico has to suck that up for our Second Amendment.
This is known as the Good Neighbor Policy. Mexicans describe it as, "Poor Mexico: So far from God, so close to the United States."
So, the government is wasting taxpayers' dollars on the Mexico border. We spend $40 million a year and still wind up with the world's richest and best-armed criminal organization on our southern border.
Gun shop owners spend their money better than the government when they replenish their stocks of guns and ammunition. That produces jobs, profits and, incidentally, taxes. We can then protest about the taxes.
The $40 million didn't make a dent in the drug traffic because while our government wasted it, the drug cartels raked in an estimated $15 billion to $25 billion from drug sales to Americans. The cartel easily could outspend our narcs.
This proves that the American people's spending is more efficient than their government's. When people spend, they get results.
Last year, Congress upped spending for drug security on the border, but that won't last when we finally confront deficits.
Anyway, the government has a long way to go before it wastes as much to keep drugs out as the private sector efficiently spends to bring them in.
It will stay that way until each of us stops putting ourself ahead of threats to all of us. We call thinking of the common good socialism now, but we didn't see it that way when there was a war on.
Tom Blackburn writes for The Palm Beach Post.
