As time goes by, I become more and more convinced that one of the main things that keeps government in business is the inability of people to imagine how anyone else could deal with the sometimes serious problems that arise in the social order. If private action fails to solve a given social problem as well as we might like, the answer is more government. Whereas if the government fails, even spectacularly, in dealing with a particular social ill, the answer is… more government. People respond to the poor performance of a government initiative not by suggesting that it be abolished, but rather by calling for government to redouble it’s efforts. Failing businesses have a tendency to go out of business (well, at least most of the time). Failing government programs, by contrast, tend to get more money. Which, when you think about it, is not a recipe for success.
People act this way, I think, not because they are just irrational, but because they don’t see an alternative. Yes, public schools in some parts of the country are just plain awful. But what’s the alternative? Just let kids roam the streets all day? Yes, the Post Office is often inefficient, costly, and they lose your mail a lot. Still, someone has to deliver the mail. If not the government, then who? Okay, so the response to hurricane Katrina by the government was just awful, and the rebuilding efforts in many cases haven’t been much better. But it’s not like anyone else is going to do the job, so the government has to. To a lot of people, saying that some problem should be left to “private charity” or “the market” sounds like saying “let’s ignore the problem and hope it goes away.” Which hardly sounds like a counsel of prudence. The truth is, though, that allowing everyone in America to try and come up with a solution to a given social problem often works a lot better than trying to impose a single solution from the top down.
Are you suggesting that education would be better without public funding? That seems unlikely to me. I like programs that provide parents more choices for the distribution of government funding (e.g. vouchers), but I don’t object to public funding of education. If you do, I think your reliance on the free markets is rather optimistic.
I’m not urgent to get rid of public funding for education, though I wouldn’t absolutely have a problem with not having it. I think that much of it comes down to BA’s point about imagination.
In the current status quo, the main imaginable way of getting the community as a whole to pay for schooling costs (rather than hitting the parents with the full costs directly) is through government means: generally city property taxes. However, if the government simply didn’t fund schools, one assumes that there would be strong incentives for other sorts of communal organizations to run schools and come up with means of funding them that spread the cost.
So for instance, perhaps a combination of churches and secular community organizations would take up the slack by starting large numbers of schools. The incentive would be strong for such organizations to find ways to staff their schools cost effectively and to loop in membership other than parents to share fiscal responsibility (and provide those other members with benefits that rewarded them for membership and fiscal contributions.)
In turn, the need to belong to a school-running group in order to secure quality schooling would incent people to join/form communities and remain active in them, in a way that the current approach does not.
Now, I don’t advocate making a precipitous switch at the moment, but I do think it’s worthwhile to point out that by seeing government solutions as the only thing capable do dealing with these kind of issues we blind ourselves to significant (and possibly better) approaches.
I think Ayn Rand wrote a pretty good book about this topic.
In all seriousness, however, let’s ask the question: WHY is this the case? Why do people react so?
I would argue the root cause of most societal problems, including this one, is the persecution of an authentic Liberal Education (meaning, the liberal arts). Individuals are not taught how to think.
People tend to forget why things were done in the first place. Take for example the creation of the FDA. People claim we should get rid of it because it is keeping medicines from getting to market. They argue that people are smart and they will cling to trustworthy companies. This forgets however that prior to the FDA there were a lot of snakeoil salesmen. Institutional integrity is also over rated. How many times have you bought a piece of junk from a company that you thought always made good products? The reason is that building something bulletproof costs real money. Kevin Trudeau should be the counterexample to everyone who doubts the credulity of the American paeople. And to finish this scattered thought, the solution of trusting no one is counterproductive you can’t have commerce without it. Trusting people and companies a little less results in very real losses.
I’m always concerned about your relationship with the postal service. We get along with our postman just fine. We get our mail. It doesn’t cost a lot to me at least.
And though Ayn was wrong about more than a few things, she is prophetic about what happens when personal responsibility vanishes. When need only look at what has happened to sexual morality since contraception was introduced.
Part of the problem is that those most strident against public programs are also adversarial or indifferent to what Christian Democracy calls mediating organizations.
A lot of workplace issues could be handled by labor and management — but of course, try to organize a union and the company sends in union busting consultants.
Try to promote credit unions to handle average working class people’s financial needs and the Big Banks have a fit.
Ask the boss for leave to attend a PTA meeting? Good luck.
Organize a folks in the neighborhood to get asbestos removed from residential buildings (by a landlord who intended only to remove it from the building manager’s office and not the residential units)? Get denounced on national TV as some silly “community organizer — what is that?”.
Rather than have the government run social programs, have it fund a large variety of non-profits? What if Planned Parenthood wins a grant application? What if they use it for ‘Midnight Basketball’?
People are hungry and starving? What about a decentralize program funded by the federal government, administered by the states, coordinated with farmers with agricultural surpluses, with outreach directed by non-governmental, community based organizations like Catholic Charities, and giving the poor the dignity to shop in commercial supermarkets, also helping to maintain the profitability of supermarkets in underserved, low income neighborhoods, and linking it all to good nutritional guidance? Sorry, Food Stamps are welfare; better the come to a soup kitchen.
Use the purchasing power of millions of senior citizens to get discounts and reasonable insurance while also speaking out on your member’s views on public policy? Get denounced as the “socialist AARP lobby”.
Sponsor bowling leagues open to all members of your local regardless of race and refuse to bowl at segregated lanes? Proof the UAW is a Communist front (ok, that’s an old one from the 1940′s, but still true history)
I, for one, am very satisfied with the U.S. Postal Service. Private mail carriers have not matched its coordination and efficiency. Of course, one may reply that this is because USPS dominates the market. But with the smaller volumes and fewer employees that the private companies manage, I would expect better efficiency. In fact, I think the balance of federal and private shares of the postal market is a great model for other high-volume, high-need spheres for citizens, such as utilities, banks, and oil.
Compulsory education is an odd duck. It is funded through taxation, nothing odd about that, but the taxes are distributed by attendance. So, in effect the children attending under penalty of law generate the revenue. So in a sense, the children are the workers, not the teachers, insofar as they generate the capital through their forced attendance. This get awfully close to forced child labour.
I, for one, am very satisfied with the U.S. Postal Service. Private mail carriers have not matched its coordination and efficiency.
The Postal Service has a legal monopoly on letter delivery, so I don’t think there are any private mail carriers for them to compete with. If you mean private parcel delivery services, such as FedEx, then I think the consensus is that such companies more than match the Postal Service in coordination and efficiency, despite the fact that the Postal Service is exempt from a wide variety of government regulations and uses the profits from its letter carrier business to set prices for its parcel service below cost.
prior to the FDA there were a lot of snakeoil salesmen.
There are a lot of snakeoil salesmen now. The FDA can’t seem to stop people like Kevin Trudeau (but does stop aspirin manufactures from saving people from heart attacks). That’s not a record of success, in my book.
You got it all wrong, peeps. The only way for the poor to blossom like daisies in a gentle spring is for the rich to pay no taxes. Every time a Gulfstream jet is bought by a captain of industry, a bread crumb falls off his table and trickles down on an undeserving poor man who should consider himself blessed.
Government handouts should be restricted to bombs on Iraq or whoever the enemy du jour is.
One of the main reasons this country is such a ripoff for regular people is that there is no concept of rights when it comes to mere sustenance. Right to health care ? Commies ! Right to financial support for the needy ? Why there goes another welfare queen in her Cadillac, licking fried chicken grease off her negro fingers.
Everything’s a battlefield, starting at school lunch break. It’s a country without pity, unless it can be engaged in via fashionable benefits or with the warm fuzzy feeling one gets from giving directly to a poor man. I’d like to trade in the web of deceit for the safety net, please.
he consensus is that such companies more than match the Postal Service in coordination and efficiency,
Whose consensus and by which standards?
Gerald, argument aside, your prose is a hoot. I love it!
ba,
We could compare advertising from 1900 with that of today and I think it would be manifest which era was producing more phony cures.
And while you can produce stories of lives not saved due to delayed action, there are many more lives saved by not allowing any concoction to be mainstreamed. Just the number of drugs the FDA has approved and later had to rescind gives us a limited view of all those lives saved.
Thanks, Sam :) Btw, I do not think that government should run everything but rather provide a safety net, something to break the fall. Losing a job meaning losing health insurance, that is grotesque – and mocking the alternative is absurd squared. My doctor writes Rx to a Canadian pharmacy for drugs not covered/with too high a co-pay. Then again, he’s European ;-)
I am also aware how awful government-run programs can be, especially in this country. I think that blacks in particular have been done a great disservice by their own governmental representatives (ie, Democrats).
I see “the projects” in this country, and then I see “the projects” in Austria. Government apartments in Vienna are usually in top shape and sought after. One qualifies based on income, number of children and the like. You’d never be able to tell a private apt. complex from a government one save for the “Built by the City of Vienna” – if anything, the city building will be in better shape. The City of Vienna has been run by “liberals” since the end of World War II. Even wealthy neighborhoods feature government complexes, as they were constructed throughout the city.
Now, looking at government housing on “The Wire”, one understands the average American’s position on government programs. Government-run hospitals (Catholic hospitals get their money from the public healthcare fund, too in Austria) are top-notch in Austria as well. There is an expectation that government is there to serve you. That it can be overdone and be exploited is without question. That small-business-rules are too strict also is.
What irks me is the conservative argumentation that exploitation is not just necessary but virtuous. We, the brave Americans, pay more for our prescription drugs so others may pay less. Why this applies to drugs made in Germany and France is usually not mentioned, then again who here can find those Commie countries on a map ?
It’d seem that it’s not the mere governmental nature that poisons efforts but rather the culture. Public schools didn’t use to be pits of ignorance and violence in the US. Government of the people by and for business certainly isn’t wont to improve the lot of the people. The system is too rigged and people too indoctrinated for any change.
Capitalism can be a great force for equality – corporations didn’t start targeting women, blacks, gays out of the goodness of their hearts, after all. The problem is, say, shady dealings without any actual capital, aka the American financial system (R.I.P.)
Private initiative always needs room. This does not have to mean, however, that you have to find yourself without health insurance, or arguing about “pre-existing conditions” (probably a uniquely American term) with a new insurance.
It’s only a free market until somebody gets hurt, then the corporation discovers the lyrics of the Internationale (and orders a private jet to sing it in) and sucks on Auntie Sam’s teat, burps, rolls up, dreams corporate dreams of golden parachutes and Bermuda’s sandy off-shores, wakes up and sticks it to customers and employees.
[...] Failure of Imagination A propos of yesterday’s post, I came across a blog post the other day about the Madoff scandal which I found quite interesting. [...]
[...] Failure of Imagination A propos of yesterday’s post, I came across a blog post the other day about the Madoff scandal which I found quite interesting. [...]
How do we look at this question differently if we define democratic government as that institution which people form in order to solve collectively those problems which cannot be solved (or cannot be solved as easily) on their own or in smaller groups?
“Liberals” say that government is “us”, not “them,” and where it is actually acting more like “them” (oppressing us, wasting our money, etc.), we say let’s make our government better–as democracy provides means for us to do.
I loved this sentence from Gerald Naus: “Why there goes another welfare queen in her Cadillac, licking fried chicken grease off her negro fingers.” Priceless.
One thinks as well of a quote from Jack Donaghy: “Everybody knows the Founding Fathers didn’t intend the poor to live past thirty.”
““Everybody knows the Founding Fathers didn’t intend the poor to live past thirty.””
Heh! And they didn’t count on George W. Bush being elected (well..) president. In those days, his kind emptied spittoons and de-loused wigs (and Whigs).