Re: Well-fed and clean in the City of Victoria (News, July 4)
I commend you on reporting much more of the uniform-cleaning picture than typical mass media people do.
Indeed, police deal with much garbage, so should not risk their families by washing clothes at home. These days, bodily fluids are hazardous substances that should be dealt with carefully using special equipment. I support this expense.
In other subjects, costs might include employee time. For example, occasionally people rail against post offices in the U.S. and Canada for providing motor vehicles to letter carriers in urban areas. But there are many factors, including the paid time that would have to be spent on a bus, the geographic layout of the route and the ability to have all the day’s mail in the vehicle, rather than have the carrier go back and forth to retrieve mail from a lockbox.
The free market, protected by a justice system, weeds out the inefficient (too many meetings and consultant studies), the profligate and the “penny wise and pound foolish” (inadequate equipment and no meetings) – company owners lose, not taxpayers.
The fewer functions performed by government the less problems, but police are one of the few proper functions of government.
Keith Sketchley
Saanich