The Gelded Age

Mark Steyn tells us about Congress' $700 million plan to manage Mustangs - not the Ford version that didn't need a bailout, but the four-legged version that does:

On Friday, July 17, the House of Representatives met to debate … Go on, take a guess: Health care? The cap-and-tax racket? Stimulus Two? No, none of the above. Don't worry, they're still spending your money. Wild horses couldn't stop them doing that.

And, as a matter of fact, that's the correct answer: wild horses. On Friday, the House passed the Restore Our American Mustangs Act – or ROAM. Like all acronymically cute legislation, its name bears little relation to what it actually does: It's not about "restoring" mustangs. The federal Bureau of Land Management aims for a manageable population of 27,000 wild mustangs. Currently, there are 36,000, and the population doubles every four or five years. To prevent things getting even more out of hand, the BLM keeps another 30,000 mustangs in holding pens – or, if you prefer, managed-care facilities. That's to say, under federal management, one in every two "wild" horses now lives in government housing. The American mustang population is road-testing the impending demographic profile of Japan and Germany: one worker for every retiree.

The welfare mustangs are supposed to be put up for adoption. But, what with the government taking all our money to fund the Barney Frank Institute of Bureaucracy Studies, many of us no longer have the necessary discretionary income to stable a mustang in the rec room. A lot of the nags in managed-care facilities are getting a bit long in the tooth, and thus are unlikely ever to find homes. So, rather than go on attempting to flog near-dead horses, the BLM was considering inviting the seniors to do the decent thing and sign up for "assisted suicide" – or, in the designated euphemism, "death with dignity." In the Netherlands, pretty much everyone over 47 who goes into hospital for a minor hernia winds up getting talked into "death with dignity." And, given that mustangs were introduced to America by the Spanish, it's not inappropriate that they should meet a European end.

ROAM would prohibit this option. In that sense, it would be acronymically more precise to name it REAM – the Restore Elderly American Mustangs Act. Under this legislation, no horses or burros could be, ah, terminated, and they would have to be released from their holding pens after six months. To facilitate the release of the tame "wild horse" population, the act adds to their present 33-million acre habitat (that's bigger than New York State) another 20 million acres – or approximately the size of Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Vermont combined. The Congressional Budget Office estimates the total tab at around $700 million – ie, chump change. If you look for it in the line-item budget, it comes down at the bottom under "rounding error." It's a mere ten-and-a-half grand per mustang. If you're wondering why it costs more to keep a horse on 52 million acres of wilderness than it does to stable him at an upscale horse farm in New England, that's because, in order to prevent the mustang population doubling again by 2013 and requiring the annexation of another 50 million acres (i.e., an area the size of Ireland, Denmark, Belgium, and the Netherlands combined), the bill mandates "enhanced" contraception for horses and burros.

There's more, and he wraps it up this way:

In 1971, the United States Congress recognized mustangs as "living symbols of the historic and pioneer spirit of the West." And surely nothing captures the essence of the "pioneer spirit" than living on welfare in a federal care facility while being showered with government contraceptives. Welcome to America in the gelded age.

Another example of a government-run enterprise that doesn't work as planned.