(This letter to the editor is in response to “The Showroom Rebuttal” by Fire Commissioner Joel Bearman that appeared in the Friday, April 15 edition of the Levittown Tribune.)
I’m glad that Levittown Fire Commissioner Joel Bearman took the opportunity to offer some clarification to my recent letter “The Showroom” in which I likened government to a BMW dealership that weighted-down by janitorial support staff at the expense of selling automobiles. I was speaking in generalities with respect to municipal services. Certainly fire commissioners in our area, unlike police commissioners and public school superintendents, are volunteers. But in many cities and counties, they are paid professionals and like their law enforcement and education counterparts, they are paid extraordinary salaries and benefits and pensions that come out of the pockets of citizens working minimum wage, multiple jobs, and dealing with bankruptcy, debt, rising costs of living, and increasing taxes.
The objective of “The Showroom” – a metaphor in which an automobile dealership comes to exist for the purposes of employing janitors – is to illustrate how, increasingly, government is an institution that exists largely to provide lucrative incomes and lifestyles to the bureaucrats that run it.
The volunteer fire department, of which Levittown and the surrounding communities enjoy and of which Mr. Bearman heads, is an example of the kind of tireless civic spiritedness and selflessness that is the diametric opposite of the phenomenon I was describing. My apologies to Mr. Bearman and anyone who might have misunderstood what I was saying.
Paul Manton
