TWO SYSTEMS OF BELIEF. It's tax-filing weekend and the friends and foes of the public sector are using the day to trot out their talking points. (Paul at Electric Commentary located several of them.) Start with Reason's Jacob Sullum.

To add insult to injury, the money extracted through this arduous, intimidating process may be spent on the Stanley Theater in Utica, the Museum of Glass in Tacoma, or the Bulgarian-Macedonian National Education and Cultural Center in Pittsburgh. These institutions are among the beneficiaries of the spending earmarks cataloged by Citizens Against Government Waste in its latest Congressional Pig Book.

It's true such pork accounts for a small percentage of the federal budget. But here's another way of looking at it: If you pay $10,000 a year in federal income taxes, your entire contribution amounts to just 1 percent of this year's subsidy for the Waterfree Urinal Conservation Initiative and 0.07 percent of the money allotted to the International Fund for Ireland, sponsor of the World Toilet Summit. Now you know you were literally correct when you speculated about where your tax dollars were going.

Not so fast, argues TPM's Ruth Rosen.

The truth is, our quality of life is far safer and more convenient because of government ordinances, regulations and inspections. Follow me through a typical day and I'll show you what I mean. Government services and regulations may seem invisible, but they’re everywhere you look.

I wake up and brush my teeth with water whose purity is inspected by government agencies. I pour some cereal and milk into a bowl. No creepy crawlers appear; both are regulated by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Federally mandated labels on the cereal box and milk container, moreover, list the ingredients contained inside.

But isn't this a false syllogism? The government regulates food. Food is safe. Therefore, absent government, food would not be safe? Julian at Hit and Run puts the question somewhat more colorfully.

Would some of these things get done without government action? And even where government is uniquely suited to perform some function, could we be getting a better value? Could we get more for less? Never mind! You didn't find roaches in your Cheerios or arsenic in your ibuprofin, the magic government-rock must be working!

There's a group-fisking in progress at that post, go there if you have an ideological axe to grind. For our purposes, can the government achieve the clean water and safe food more effectively by mandatory inspections rather than voluntary self-certification? Keep in mind that one of the mandatory water-quality disclosures in DeKalb is a great inducement to buy bottled water.

There are a few observations in Ms Rosen's post that provoke further questions.

As I drive, I slow down for city workers fixing potholes. I pass the public library where I often do research. I stop at lights and signs that regulate traffic and keep drivers from murdering all the kids walking to public schools. I park and walk to a Bay Area Rapit Transit subsway station, financed with public money. From the window of the train, I see cars locked in gridlock on an interstate freeway funded by the federal government.

There are two seasons in Illinois, winter and construction.

For discussion: what penalty does the secretary of state pay for not pricing the truck licenses in such a way as to recover the incremental cost of patching the potholes those trucks generate? What penalty does the highway commissioner pay for not scheduling the repairs in such a way as to keep the roads fluid? (The superintendent of transportation and roadmaster and dispatcher of a railroad can get themselves in a lot of trouble for making a muddle of the maintenance windows.) Is the traffic engineer accountable to anyone for mal-timing the traffic lights such that cars stack up at each intersection, with queuing delays that propagate repeatedly as the lights change? Can we really call the gridlocked freeway "free?" Discuss also the horizontal and vertical equity implications of publicly funded roads. Quantify the corporate welfare implicit in those subsidies to the trucks, or the regressive transfer in provision of extra lanes for the sport-utes from the well-to-do suburbs.

Perhaps the public sector strikes the best balance between efficient and equitable provider of internal improvements such as roads. But that ought not be taken on faith.