Washington ( CNN ) -- Imagine that some member of Congress back in the 1990s had devoted himself or herself to toughening America against terrorism . He or she had introduced legislation to require airlines to harden their cockpit doors . After years of work , he or she at last prevailed and the new law went into effect sometime in early 2000 . The 9/11 plot would have been thwarted without any American ever knowing that the plot had existed . Question : Would we now remember that imaginary member of Congress as a person of wisdom and foresight who averted a national disaster ? Hardly . In a world in which 9/11 never happened , the people who prevented it would have gone unremembered and unthanked . Or worse . It 's very possible that they would have been laughed at as tedious people who invested ridiculous amounts of energy against a probably imaginary threat -- the way , say , some laughed at the people who solved the Y2K problem about that same time . Of all the unfairnesses in politics , the greatest unfairness is how little we reward the supreme public service : `` to provide against preventable evils , '' in the famous phrase of the British politician , Enoch Powell . The politicians who act after disaster reap the gratitude of the nation , like Rudy Giuliani amid the rubble of New York City . Officials whose warnings are ignored at least gain the credit of their prophecy if the warnings come to pass . But those who successfully mobilize public action in good time ? How would we even know who they are ? How do we separate the wise from the unwise , the genuinely visionary from the cranks and hysterics ? For every Sheila Bair urging early action about subprime mortgages , there are a hundred Glenn Becks urging Americans to stockpile nonhybrid seeds against the coming global apocalypse . The saddest fate of all , however , befalls the official who saves the country from a greater disaster by incurring or accepting some lesser damage . The politicians who supported the financial rescue in 2008 get no applause . Sen. Bob Bennett of Utah lost his Republican primary in 2008 in large part due to his emphatic support of TARP , the Troubled Asset Relief Program . Voters see politicians rushing money to rescue high-flying bankers from the bankers ' own irresponsibility and , naturally , the voters do not like it . The politicians insist that they acted to save the country from an even greater disaster . But who believes them ? For that matter , who even knows what such a `` greater disaster '' would possibly look like ? Suppose for example that Herbert Hoover and his administration had taken all the most exactly correct possible steps in response to the crash of 1929 . Suppose they had rapidly infused the banking system with emergency credit , gone off the gold standard when Britain did in 1931 , and organized the mutual forgiveness of the enormous debts and reparations left over from World War I . Suppose that -- thanks to this wise action -- the world economy had begun to recover in late 1931 . In such a case , the worst year of the Great Depression -- 1932 -- would have been a year of slow economic improvement worldwide rather than radical economic collapse . In such a case , Adolf Hitler might well never have come to power . ( The Nazis won their biggest political victory in the German parliamentary elections of July 1932 , when they won 37 % of the seats . When Germans next voted , in November 1932 , the Nazis dropped 2 million votes . But by then the democratic system had nearly terminally collapsed . ) Timely effective action in 1929-30 might thus have prevented World War II . Yet the timeliest and most effective action in 1929-30 would still have left the United States much worse off in November 1932 than in November 1928 . Herbert Hoover would still have presided over the worst recession in 20th century history and would still have lost the 1932 election to Franklin Delano Roosevelt . No doubt Roosevelt , that supreme opportunist , would have slammed Hoover for his `` bailouts '' and `` giveaways '' to banks and foreigners . And who would ever have known what lay behind the door we did not open ? Think of that limit on our knowledge , the next time you are inclined to a hasty judgment of political leaders and their measures . We know what we see . What we can not see may be what matters most . The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of David Frum .
David Frum : I think the real problem is that we have a government which has been hijacked by people who are not elected to office but appointed and paid for with our tax dollars. He says those who react after a crisis develops are recognized . Do n't judge politicians too hastily , Frum says .