COUNTY LEADERS EXTEND INEPT REACH TOO FAR.

Byline: James Bemis Commentary

You wouldn't ask someone with multiple divorces to give you marital advice. You wouldn't want a bankrupt person telling you how to manage your financial affairs.

And you certainly wouldn't want a group that is up to its elbows in alligators dictating how to run your business.

Yet that's exactly what the Board of Supervisors is doing in supporting imposing a ``living wage'' requirement for firms doing business with Ventura County. Under this proposal, approved 4-1, companies with more than five employees that contract with the county must pay workers at least $8 or $10 hourly, depending on benefits, and provide time off for illness, holidays and vacation.

It's hard to imagine a less qualified group dictating to businesses what wages and working conditions should be.

During the board's watch, the county's Behavioral Health Department has been found to have used fraudulent billing practices and, as a result, owes millions to both the federal and state governments. Recently, an attempted merger between the mental health and social services departments was an embarrassing fiasco.

In late 1997, let us remember, the county's crime lab was so fouled up that judges threw out a number of DUI cases and lambasted the District Attorney's Office for concealing the matter.

Maybe the county ought to tend to its own shop before telling business owners how to run theirs.

Like most liberal programs, the living-wage mandate is destined to hurt the very people its intended to help. Entry-level jobs remain the best way for low-skilled workers to develop the expertise and experience needed to move up in the workplace.

Some jobs, according to the market, aren't worth paying $10 an hour but they might be worth, say, $7 or $8 per hour. Wouldn't the low-skilled worker be better off employed at $8 per hour rather than unemployed with out-of-reach jobs starting at $10?

Furthermore, the living-wage program must necessarily drive up government's costs. The low-cost bidder who employs low-skilled workers at below living-wage levels and does great public good by hiring these people in the process - will lose out to the higher-cost competitor, perhaps one who makes greater use of labor-saving technology, leaving low-skilled job seekers to the wolves.

The added costs of the contracted service, naturally, are borne by the taxpayer. On the whole, then, does the living-wage program leave society better off?

Then, of course, contractors must be audited for compliance with mandated wage levels. Another layer of meddling bureaucracy is added to give the program teeth, compounding the business owner's headaches and the taxpayers' already considerable woes. Meanwhile, those seeking entry-level work remain unemployed.

The only winner in this scheme - with bigger budgets and more staff - is the county government itself.

Government functions best when it serves as a sort of impartial umpire, protecting life and property and not worrying about determining winners or losers. This allows people the freedom to seek happiness in their own way. It is difficult enough for the state to manage to do this limited - but crucial - task well.

But some, like our county supervisors, see government as a vast reservoir of latent power, waiting like Aladdin's genie to be directed for their chosen uses. This is the totalitarian mind-set, one that has made this the bloodiest of all centuries. I'm not equating the ``living wage'' program with the rampages of our era's worst dictators, of course, but each stems from the same malignant source - the state that refuses to accept its limits.

It's hard to imagine what gives county supervisors the idea they have the wisdom to dictate wages to the marketplace, while their kingdom is in shambles all around them. In the universe they occupy, I suppose, courtier staff race around waving white paper reports, telling the board they can be like gods, changing their surroundings with just a single word. Whatever world they live in up at the County Government Center, though, it isn't the real one.