Write something about the role of government these days and you'll get a wide range of responses. That was certainly true after my July Onsite Installer column about what government is doing or should do to help to provide sanitation for impoverished areas like the Black Belt region of Alabama.

I wrote about the roles of the onsite industry and of government in solving such problems, about the prospect of using tax dollars as part of the solution, and about the need to decide "what kind of country and what kind of people we want to be."

Study in contrast

Two letters I received in response illustrate the divide that exists about government's role. One (published last month) spoke with pride of a program in Arkansas that has used federal Community Development Block Grant funds to replace, so far, nearly 40 septic systems for poor families.

Another decried deplorable conditions in immigrant villages near the border in Texas, including poor sanitary conditions, and allowed that the answer did not lie in government involvement but in enforcing current immigration laws and reducing "government taxation and involvement in every area of our lives."

The letter concluded: "This is still a free enterprise country where healthful sanitary conditions are available to every person. There are only two groups: Those who are willing to work for those better conditions and who are being called on to carry the second group – those not willing to work for them. That group is awaiting your 'government policies' to give them those conditions for free."

What government does

Now, without a doubt, many people who fall into the "less government" camp live in homes in clean, sanitary communities served by sewerage and wastewater treatment systems – likely built using absolutely massive federal government subsidies.

Free enterprise is the engine of our economy and of society's betterment as a whole, but there are certain areas where government really needs to be involved, and they include things like building roads, providing for national defense – and, yes, providing sanitary conditions and safe, clean drinking water.

Self reliance is great; we all should pull our own weight. But not every poor rural resident without a working septic system is in that situation through his or her own fault. Many are there by reason of bad economic conditions, ill health, aging, disability.

Let's talk it out

The fundamental fact is that here in the world's richest country, we have many thousands of people living in nearly third world sanitary conditions, and we're applying very little by way of resources on their behalf.

Are some of these people in fact lazy freeloaders? Probably. But does that justify turning our collective back on an entire group of people? If everyone were born into this great poker game of life holding the same hand of cards, then perhaps the "everyone for him/herself" approach would be appropriate. But life is not that neat and simple.

There is a clear role for government involvement where people's basic health is at stake, and that is surely the case where sanitary conditions are concerned. In this and other social justice questions, it is difficult and messy to debate where the legitimate role of government begins and ends. But debate we must.

And in such a debate, the positions that we should throw government money at every problem, and that we must reduce "government taxation and involvement in every area of our lives," are extreme and inappropriate postures.

Indeed, what kind of country and what kind of people do we want to be?