Government Evaporates as Government Expands

more power, less service

Henninger Flats is an urban campground, three miles by trail above Pasadena, California, at the edge of the Angeles National Forest. It’s peaceful, wooded, and inescapably connected to the cities below it. You can sit in your tent in the woods with deer walking around the campground and look at downtown Los Angeles. I took this picture on Saturday:

Sunsets are like this:

And click over to look at this picture, which I’d have to steal to post here. It’s like that.

I’ve been walking up to Henninger Flats for three decades, and we’ve used it for easy family camping trips. We fell asleep in our tent one night, alone in the campground, and woke up in the morning to the surprise discovery that we were in a field of sleeping Boy Scouts — which led to a month of family jokes about stealth scouting and Boy Assassins of America. “Boy Scouts don’t sleep — they wait.”

Henninger Flats is run by the Forestry Division of the Los Angeles County Fire Department, with three separate campgrounds and a large reforestation nursery. For decades, a forestry assistant did a 24-hour shift in the visitor center, sleeping upstairs at night to be available to help campers in an emergency. Since it takes a long uphill walk to get there, the county forestry staff split firewood and piled it by the nursery, free for the cost of carrying it to your campsite.

Today there is no camping at Henninger Flats, and no nighttime or weekend staffing, and the plant beds at the nursery sit empty. Three tax-funded campgrounds, used for decades by thousands of families for an easy escape to the woods, are unused. I apologize for holding the phone vertically — I just forgot — but look at all this wasted potential:

I grew up in Southern California, and would never have imagined the possibility of a single county official declaring a prison-style lockdown for ten million people, or a swarm of government officials descending on a lone paddleboarder for criminal use of the ocean:

I also grew up camping in woods with well-maintained campgrounds that were watched over by rangers who were helpful. That staffing is mostly gone; visitor centers in national forest recreation areas are poorly staffed, often closed, and frequently run by volunteers. A growing number of national forest campgrounds are run by private contractors who collect a corporate fee for the use of public land.

$6 trillion federal budget; limited ranger staffing and padlocked visitor centers.

As government becomes more powerful, intrusive, and expensive, it provides less and less service. It does less that’s useful to us. The relationship has changed, and the change happened recently. It’s not clear if it’s happened permanently.