And We're Watching Back!
They say we Americans learn our geography through war; not a charitable or accurate assessment of our culture, but it’s accurate at least in its estimate of how attentive we are to the subject. Most schools stopped teaching geography long ago. Foreign news bureaus are usually the first to be shut down when the newspapers are pinched. Canadians get really angry with us for not paying them any serious attention. The New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman was forced to tell a lecture hall full of Middle-Easterners complaining about supposed American abuse that, the truth is, we don’t think about them at all (pre 9-11). We are large and complex and prosperous enough that we don’t really need to pay much attention to the rest of the world – except for trade and sports – unless something really bad happens.
So, if I lead off by asking you to look around the world (other than Iraq and Afghanistan) in order to observe the cause of most serious problems not precipitated by nature, I can’t be sure I’m even communicating. I could be wrong, but it almost always seems to be government. From little things gone ballistic, like the Danish cartoons of the Prophet, to larger matters like the years-long torching of cars in Paris by its alienated Muslim population. Lately, we have the Greek labor riots when the unions realized they might have to take a cutback due to the country’s massive unpayable debts. Other Europeans can relate because, regardless of country, there’s always someone on strike.
Nearly all of Africa, North and South, is a mess – to put it politely – and blaming white colonialism reached its expiration date years ago. South American governments, likewise like to continue blaming the Yanquis for all their problems, with special attention to capitalism, which they’ve never really tried, but like to tout its failure, rather than their own. Most of the wars and civil strive around the planet are about bad governance; the rest about culture, religion and property rights. Everywhere you look, poverty, the default condition of the human race, is exacerbated by incompetent or authoritarian governance.
We’re luckier here. We have a system designed to protect the individual from the government, even as the individual shoulders the responsibility of being informed enough to elect honest, competent officials. When this is working, we have national unity, laws we’re proud of, reasonable taxes and regulations and a land of opportunity. The government can only create jobs by hiring people directly or by contract. Otherwise, in a dynamic economy governed by the decisions of millions of independent individuals, the government’s role is to stay out of the way as much as possible. Sounds a bit odd and even selfish, but that’s what has worked to lift more people out of poverty and give more people lives of freedom than in any system ever devised.
Democracy has several innate problems, despite its manifest advantages in promoting self-rule. In the beginning, many predicted that it would fail once the people realized they could vote themselves the public purse. Today, that purse is eagerly doled out to a greedy populace by politicians addicted to buying votes with Other People’s Money. Those receiving such favors, or expecting to, recirculate some of the largesse back to the pols as campaign contributions.
Another problem is the addiction to power that caused us to create a Constitutional Republic in the first place, with the founders warning us that it would take vigilance and hard work to maintain. Our politicians now have the ability to draw lines on the map that contain the voters most favorable to them, rendering most incumbents invulnerable to challenge. The money and the preoccupation with incumbency tends to cause a slip in constitutional principles, so that the government is trapped in a paradigm that they are helpless to change. Standards slip. The number of people who matter to that incumbency shrinks at the expense of both the local and – where applicable – national constituencies.
The last brick in this wall is the politicians’ need to be relevant. They have to have programs, and the programs need tax dollars. The programs are a pretext for incumbency. At its worst, totally useless projects are devised, some physical, like highways that are duplicative and make no sense, to funding private citizens on whatever can be plausibly explained. The evil twin here is the matrix of taxes that fuel these efforts, and the politicians’ discovery that they can use the tax system to bully businesses and engineer social change (read: control).
Which brings us back to all those destructive world governments. The ones that wreck economies and oppress citizens. When you get too much or too little government, you start to accumulate intractable problems. Problems caused by no care at all, or official care that is intrusive and destructive of private effort. A vigilant populace armed with a written set of legal principles that all agree are essential to social cohesion will usually be able to avoid the creation of such problems by electing competent people and watching that the principles are not breached.
When a breach occurs, you get opportunistic standards, inappropriate priorities and conspiratorial institutions that avoid dealing with real problems that are most likely a result of their own corrupt decisions. You are likely – if the population has become disengaged and uninformed – to get charismatic populists instead of problem solvers. If you’re unlucky, the populist has an authoritarian, anti-constitutional streak. This can lead to policies that, regardless of their stated goals, are primarily designed for control.
Given the observable history, recent and ancient, here and abroad, is there any reasonable expectation to conclude that government is capable of correctly identifying and solving – rather than creating – major, intractable problems? Here, Social Security and Medicare are going broke. The states can’t afford Medicaid. Amtrak hasn’t worked for years. The Post Office gets more expensive daily while getting beat by private services. Our government-run schools are a disaster, and the original impetus for the most recent financial crisis was provided by – you guessed it – government.
Our do-gooders, the supposedly well-intentioned of both the left and right, are killing our society. Totally ignoring the lessons of alcohol prohibition, the government created one for drugs that is undermining our institutions, arming our enemies, toppling governments, creating international criminal armies, ruining our inner cities and causing racial friction.
It would be ridiculously easy to name more unsolvable, government-sponsored programs, but surely you get the idea. It just leaves me with one, overwhelming question: Are we nuts? How can we even imagine that the health and energy programs proposed by this administration – with historically unprecedented and unaffordable price tags – should actually be enacted into law?
Very insightful article!