Eager volunteers

States across the nation are still struggling to balance their budgets. Workers have been furloughed or let go, and some services have been suspended.

But a funny thing is happening in many places: Volunteers are stepping in to do what the well-paid public employees no longer do.

According to USA Today, for example, many states have cut back on maintaining green belts on highways. The state of Virginia spent $42 million a year mowing grass in 2009. This year it will spend $20 million. In response, a group of volunteers has stepped right in, seeking permits to mow the lawns adjacent to low-volume primary and secondary roads.

Meanwhile, in Detroit, residents have long ceased depending on the government for services residents elsewhere take for granted. The city is a budget basket case and barely has enough funds to ensure police can patrol the streets.

In one East Side neighborhood, 63-year-old Eddie Edwards "is chopping down tall weeds in empty lots and cleaning the alleyways behind his home and across the street," The Wall Street Journal reports. "He also takes care of the street sweeping, using just a broom and a pan."

Throughout the city, volunteers -- not bureaucrats -- work to improve parks and neighborhoods.

When governments cut back, they too often do so in a manner specifically designed to inflict the most possible pain on taxpayers, thus better wearing down citizen resistance to higher taxes. (Remember the partial federal government shutdown of 1997? The feds "shut down" Lake Mead.)

What these examples highlight is that if states and municipalities warn that they might shut down parks or stop maintaining tennis courts or ball fields as a means of dealing with budget pressures -- as Nevada governments already have -- there are thousands of citizen volunteers willing to take over many of the functions the government has abandoned.

And when that happens, municipalities should encourage such a response, not seek to stop some Good Samaritan from clearing the weeds behind home plate because he doesn't have the proper permits.