Guess Who? J. Wilke

Just imagine how much they'd be spending if they had to buy their own broadcast time! You won't have to imagine it for long. They are now pushing for per mission to pay for their o\vn mes sages so they can pick .. better time slots. Miss Wilke is an advertising writer. 37 38 THE FREEMAN January While the rest of government was reportedly tailoring budgets in the past year, advertising ex penditures increased 10 %. What are they selling you may well ask. Well, uh - there's the Post Office. 'But they don't have any compe tition, you scream. Silly, you. Where' there's a bu reaucrat, there's a "vay. The Post Offieespent $8 million in 1974 and is currently spending $13 million a year. A $4 million campaign is bud geted to tell people to give for warding addresses when they move. The Post Office says it spends $300 million a year in avoid able forwarding labor costs. ,They must spend a lot of time staring blankly at those letters before re turning them' to the" senders or putting them in the Dead Letter bin.) Most recently it has been pro ducingtelevision spots for the pur pose of "promoting letter writing to increase the use of first class mai1."

This may seem strange to you, especially since the Post Office con tinually uses increased volume of mail as an excuse for inefficiency and the need for increasing postage rates. Thus we taxpayers are in the po sition of paying our money to persuade ourselves to write more let ters and thereby increase the mail load so the Post Office can charge us more for their expanded serv ices. Such is the absurdity that is in evitable when a government agency gets involved in marketable serv ices. And this campaigin will double the Post Office's ad expenditures to almost $30 million a year. All because postal authorities, with stunning buffoonery, want and ex pect people to use mail more fre quently at the 13¢ rate than they did at 10¢ ... even though use de clined greatly with the last rate increase. Or, m-aybe they don't reaLly ex pect it. The Postmaster General concurrently is requesting Con gress to double Post Office sub sidies to almost $2 billion a year for the next few years.

If the postal service were in the pri vate sector where it belongs, along with all other non-protection services, advertising would not be purchased out of deficits and in spite of losses. It would be paid out of the same costs that would trans form the service into a smooth-run ning, efficient and economical sys tem ... a condition which can be as sured only by competition in the private sector. And the taxpayer / consumer would not be spending 1976 GUESS WHO! 39 money to work against his own in terests. We taxpayers are spending another $16 million to tell ourselves to put out our matches, stay physi cally fit, get exercise, stop smoking, join car pools and so forth. We spend millions to tell people about the welfare they should be getting. People who don't need wel fare often don't know they're en titled to it anyway. So the 'taxpay er pays out of his own pocket to tell people to come and take his money whether they need it or not.

The bulk of government's adver tising budget is used for military recrui tmen t. The Army alone spent $35 mil Honon recruitment advertising in the last year. This may very well be the most invisible $35 million in the history of advertising. It strains the imagination to think of lhow so much advertising money could pos sibly be spent so unobtrusively. The cost breakdown in Ad Age (August 18, 1975) reveals $7lh million spent in magazines, about $1% million in outdoor and less than $1 million in newspaper sup plements. The other $25 million is not accounted for except in a rather miscellaneous way as direct mail, displays, transit posters and pro motional materials. And next y,ear's budget has been upped $5 million to $40 million. Where is the money going? One can only wonder. When the government spends money, there are not the restraints of profit/loss statements. We are not told how many were recruited - or what the goal is. We do kno'w, of course, that we already have servicemen populating countries all over the world.

If, as one branch says, they're "just looking for a few good men," the recruitment cost per man is astronomical. But tax money is like a mountain - it's just there. You can go to it any time and if you're a bureaucrat, it will even come to you. Some questions persist: What great need for recruitment advertising can there be when vir tua:lly an youngsters are exposed to recruitment through school ROTC programs? Why is so much advertising nec essary when the services all have big recruitment staffs? What better officer recruitment could there be than our military schools and the academies? If recruitment is so difficult why are appointments to the academies always in such demand? What other organization's bene fits are so well known as the mili tary's 20-year retirement, medical and dental care, clothing, housing, training, travel and the like?

40 THE FREEMAN January The Army is at least as well known as the Hershey Bar which spends no more than a whisper in advertising and for many decades found it unnecessary to advertise at all. If anyone has the temerity to in quire why the Army budget is be ing increased to $40 million for re cruitment at a time of unemploy ment when the Army should be more attractive than ever, the re sponse is that the Army doesn't want just anyone. It must compete with industry for high quality per sonnel. So, now it becomes clear. All this expense isn't the cost of a volunteer military as opposed to the draft. The draft was never so persnickety. We're simply paying the cost of another federal boondoggle. Judging by the budget, the Army must want to recruit the Chairman of General Motors. The taxpayer now finds himself in the position of paying money to hire people he can't get while turn ing down the most likely, willing candidates for military service.

Once again, his tax dollars are working in opposition to his best interests. These expenditures simply rep resent another form of the draft . . . another uncalled for drain on the creative sector. We are not only drawing millions of dollars out of the market coer cively through taxes ... money that would otherwise be used pro ductively. We are also drawing away skills - or attempting to. If we are paying these sums to lure high caliber people into non-cre ative, protective jobs, we are losing more than .money. Weare losing productive ability. By turning down the unemployed· we are pay ing to keep the less skilled in the market where they are contribut ing minimally or collecting unem ployment compensation, which we also pay. The military is trying to attract the least-suited for service while turning down the best-suited. Our tax dollars further compete with each other by pitting the serv ices against each other. In addition to the $40 million Army budget, the Navy spends $23 million, the Air Force, $16 million and the Ma rine Corps, $8 million. The Marines quite understandably support the idea of an umbrella campaign for all the major services. But while paying to bring people into the mil itary branches, we are also paying to keep them out.

The government is seeking to pay for radio and TV time in order to reach younger people, its prime prospects, without depending up on the free public service time availabilities. But at the same time, 1976 GUESS WHO! 41 the government is spending our tax money to tell these same young people to go to college - and at gov ernmen t expense. Unemployment compensation al so helps pay people to stay out of the military. All welfare programs are in competition with our mili tary recruitment programs. We are using our tax dollars to bid up the cost of protecting ourselves. The public and private sectors of the economy can never mix without the overlap being in many ways un just and disadvantageous to every body. It is absolutely right to have a volunteer military, but wasteful tax expenditures, unrealistic aims and unnecessary encroachment in the market are merely a more indi rect method of drafting resources from the creative sector.

These budgets are typical of the way in which bureaucrats enlarge their responsibilities via .ridicu lous expenditures and self-perpet uating waste. This is not what's needed for a volunteer military. It can only defeat the whole idea. The government should happily accept its public service status for broadcast time and should depend on voluntary help or its own per sonnel for any other publicity needs. It should not be bidding up prices in the market. The Advertising Council, through volunteer agencies, pre pares public service advertising for many causes, none of which is so important as the military pro tection of the country. Their help would probably be forthcoming if the agencies didn't have $110 mil lion in budgets waved at them. Even if volunteer aid. were not forthcoming, it is difficult to seethe need for recruitment advertising for services that have military academies, ROTC programs, infor mation officers, recruitment per sonnel and the Government Print ing Office at their disposal.

Whenever the government mixes in the private, creative sector of the economy we find we're fighting ourselves with our own dollars. All objectives become self-defeating. It happens when welfare com peteswith wages, when laws con trol prices and salaries, when sub sidies push up prices, when tariffs raise the cost of imports, when gov ernment-protected unions disrupt production, when government waste bids up prices of scarce ma terials and services - many ways. The mili tary, among others, could take a lesson from little Pogo who once uttered that immortal line, "We have met the enemy and he is us." ~ RIDGWAY K. FOLEY, JR. INDIVIDUAL RESPONSIBILITY refers to man's willingness and ability to unflinchingly and without excep tion abide the consequences of every human act and choice. Con sequence follows choice inexorably. We live in a world of causal connection, a universe governed by predictable responses and guided by natural law. The earth spins on its axis while rotating in a fixed pattern about a celestial orb, lead ing to the result of a rising sun in the East each morning. In like manner, human action affects hu man history: "bad money drives out good" and "men are less care ful with the liberties of others than with their own" state na tural retorts to human conduct.