TheAgitator.com
A Distinction
Tuesday, April 20th, 2010The American Prospect’s Mori Dinauer is just a hair off in this post.
I don’t promote government failure, I expect it. And my expectations are met fairly often. What I promote is the idea that more people share my expectations, so fewer people are harmed by government failure, and so we can stop this slide toward increasingly large portions of our lives being subject to the whims, interests, and prejudices of politicians.
I will concede that there’s a problem, here. In the private sector, failure leads to obsolescence (unless, of course, you work for a portion of the private sector that politicians think should be preserved in spite of failure). When government fails, people like Dinauer and, well, the government claim it’s a sign that we need more government. It’s not that government did a poor job, or is a poor mechanism for addressing that particular problem, it’s that there just wasn’t enough government. Of course, the same people will point to what they call government success as, also, a good argument for more government.
It’s a nifty trick. The right does it with national security. The fact that we haven’t had a major terrorist attack since September 11, 2001 proves that the Bush administration’s heavy-handed, high-security approach to fighting terrorism worked! But if we had suffered another attack, the same people would have been arguing that we need to surrender more of our civil liberties to the security state. Two sides. Same coin.
That Pew poll is also a pretty good indication that the more government tries to do, the more poorly it does it. Your usual caveats about correlation and causation apply, but the federal government certainly didn’t shrink over the period the trust-in-government trend line has taken a nosedive. Note too that during the Clinton administration, federal spending actually shrank as a percentage of GDP, and the federal workforce shrank by nearly 400,000, leaving it at its lowest level since 1960. And wouldn’t you know it, that’s one period in the last 50 years over which trust in the federal government took a sharp climb.
But in general—yes—I think the fact that more people are realizing that government isn’t capable of solving all of their problems is an encouraging trend. Because it isn’t.
How much did the Republican Party pay Lisa Simpson for her anti-terrorism tiger rock?
Yeah, heads they win tails they win. Which is why it won’t change until it collapses.
Happy Belated Birthday, Radley. April 19th, Patriot’s Day, is the only “holiday” I observe; I’ll spend the day my way if my company wants to let me off for Memorial Day, or Labor Day, or whatever, but the day when we took up arms, stood our ground, and gave birth to a country founded on the *principle* of freedom is the only one I celebrate in my heart.
I got the kids up at 4 a.m. to make it to Lexington in time for the reenactment. Adults opened up a space for my youngest daughter to watch it from the rope line, but I stood back in the crowd and tried to record it (and experiment with Qik) with my Droid.
You can see it here – http://qik.com/video/6159543
The Droid doesn’t autorotate the video feed, but my son showed me a neat trick; CRTL-ALT-right arrow rotates the computer display, CTRL-ALT-up arrow puts it back. I think I’ll keep him.
I don’t idolize the Revolutionary War or the Founding Fathers as an end point in freedom; it was the natural progression of power devolving to its rightful place, namely the individual. From kings to Parliament to elected representatives, human progress is linked to that transition of power from the autocrat to the individual, but sadly we broke the spell with the adoption of the Constitution and the slow, punctuated consolidation of power in a central government. As much as I admire the intellectual effort behind the the Federalist Papers, the warnings of the anti-federalists proved to be prescient. The main lesson I take from the Revolutionary era is that the natural, organic endpoint of politics (the organization of human interaction) is free market anarchism. The Constitution is tattered and shot through with holes; there is no repairing it. As much as I admire Ron Paul and all he has done in Congress, the only way forward with *true* human progress is to reject government all together.
Rooting for government to fail is like rooting for the US Olympic Basketball team to beat a junior high school rookie squad.
You know it’s gonna happen, the only question is: How high are they gonna run up the score?
Promoting trust in government? What fantasy world does this guy inhabit? Trust in government leads to Wacos, to bullying attempts to seize en masse private communications without warrants, to massive overspending, to special interest spending, to civil asset forfeiture… Well, my blood is all angried up now so I’ll stop, but..
Can he really be that naive?
I would say our country would be a lot healthier if the every citizen had a deep-seated distrust of all things governmental.
Yes Peter, Progressives really are that naive. They think solely in terms of good-and-evil. Libertarians oppose government intervention to accomplish goal X, therefore they are against goal X. Repeat ad nauseam, for everything under the sun. Oh, also add juvenile, debunked-a-million-times stupid trope of libertarian solutions only benefitting the rich. Oh and COMPLETE IGNORANCE of Public Choice economics. Thats your typical “Progressive”
Right on!
Most liberals (and often conservatives as well, especially on the war issue) have a superstitious, magical view of the world. All problems can be solved by sheer will, if only we want it enough. The idea that there are inescapable trade-offs that mean we can’t achieve every desirable outcome, or that some significant, unpleasant aspects of the world cannot be fixed no matter how badly we want to make it better just doesn’t register.
OK, wait, did a (presumably) Libertarian just accuse OTHER PEOPLE of having a “superstitious, magical view of the world”?
My head, she asplode.
But in general—yes—I think the fact that more people are realizing that government isn’t capable of solving all of their problems is an encouraging trend. Because it isn’t.
At least, not in a way anyone actually wants.
Well, I would find a survey that says that teen-agers don’t think Mountain Dew is an effective form of birth control to be encouraging. By Mori’s logic, I guess that means I’m “rooting” for Mountain Dew to not prevent conception.
@#8 I suppose I did, but at least I don’t want to rob you blind or order you about.
Or send your son off to some fucking trackless wasteland of sand and rock to die for a fucking lie. There’s that one too.
[...] 21, 2010 by Aaron Radley Balko’s response to Mori Dinauer’s post is so good it’s worth quoting in full. [...]
Peter:
It’s too late to win your argument – Joey’s girly head already asploded.
“As much as I admire Ron Paul and all he has done in Congress, the only way forward with *true* human progress is to reject government.”
Wait. Aren’t we all supposed to say that?
Good to see you, Rob.
Mori Dinauer’s argument is that increased trust in government facilitates reduction in government spending. He links to an argument that experience in Canada and Scandanavia support this conclusion. It doesn’t seem, in responding to Dinauer’s piece, that Radley addressed this at all. So the response seems off by a hair as well.
Anyone in the United States of America who promotoes trust in government hasn’t read and understood the most basic tenants of our country.
Its ironic to find a bunch of people whining about how they expect
“the government to fail” on the internet, which is a prime example of how government can be successful. (The internet was invented and developed purely by government, with the specific intent of providing a robust data communication infrastructure)
The facts are that for the most part government IS successful at most things it does. Sure there are failures, but the same is true of ANY enterprise- people complain about government waste, and it happens, but private enterprise does the same. I’ve witnessed companies blow more money on failed projects than many things people complain about in the public sector. The difference of course is accountability. 99 times out of the 100 corporate execs sweep boondoggles under the rug or claim that waste resulting from poor decisions is “the cost of doing business”. Accountability in the public sector seems to me to be much greater, I’ve actually scene government officials lose their jobs over poor decisions, a rarity in the business world – the downside is that this has a chilling effect on risk taking – one of the biggest problems with public sector operations.
Accountability in the public sector seems to me to be much greater, I’ve actually scene government officials lose their jobs over poor decisions, a rarity in the business world – the downside is that this has a chilling effect on risk taking – one of the biggest problems with public sector operations.
Thanks, Bob, I needed a good laugh this morning. Government officials lose their jobs over poor decisions while private sector executives don’t? Unless you consider getting transferred from one department to another to be “los[ing] their jobs” you’re living in lala land.
Oh right, private sector executives surely suffer for their misdeeds, as long as you consider getting “fired” with a set-for-life severance package while “losing one’s job” to be “accountability” in any way. The private sector is not some inerrant entity, and neither is government.
Has pure free-market anarchism ever been tried anywhere successfully?
This is an honest question. I once heard that the Vikings operated that way but I never researched it.
I always thought the Vikings got along by raping and pillaging and plundering.
But it seems like that was on a Kirk Douglas movie I once watched.
War on Drugs, War on Poverty, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Social Security, US Post Office, etc. ad nauseum. Have you seen the actuarial liabilities of the federal government?
No, it doesn’t. Unless a private business gets bailed out by the government or has a sweet deal via legislation (subsidies, tariffs on foreign competitors, regulatory hurdles for upstart would-be competitors), the private business doesn’t get to take a piece of your paycheck to cover the failure. When competitors are not disadvantaged by government, those who don’t fail take more of the market, pushing out those businesses that do fail.
That’s absolutely impossible. The biggest corporations have budgets orders of magnitude less than the DEA, DoD, SS, HUD–to name just a few. Even the automakers and banks who were “too big to fail” had tiny losses compared to the cost of the war in Iraq, for example. No comparison.
Everything you said is exactly upside-down and backwards. The first sentence, absent your Bizarro World application, is true. There is accountability in the private sector and very little in the government.
The private sector isn’t an entity of any sort. It’s not singular or monolithic.
You guys are exactly wrong about accountability. But even if you had a leg to stand on when it came to statistics, you can never get past the ethical barrier of private property.
The owners of a business (like stockholders) have every right to give executives as much money as they want. It’s their money to throw away, if that’s what they choose.
The government is playing with money it takes by force. Politicians and bureaucrats don’t have the moral authority to do as they please with it.
Also, show me how small businesses (a massive portion of the US economy) get to write of massive failures without folding up.
A new kind of government can be a solution for some problems that a current one is not solving very well.
P.-S. I relate about the different kinds of govenment on my blog if it can be interesting for anybody.
I have to agree with bobzbob here. I mean look, the Bush Administration rather clearly committed the criminal infractions of murder, torture, kidnapping and spying. Plus they obviously lied us into a war that killed at least a few hundred thousand people and possibly a million. Not only was that administration thoroughly investigated, but criminal prosecutions were pursued against high-ranking officials, because, hey, the law is the law!
On the other hand, Bernie Madoff is sitting on a beach somewhere with his golden parachute. Companies that were NOT bailed out by the government like Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns are still turning huge profits, GM did not have to re-tool or shrink in size – not a single lay-off!! And Goldman is stuggling to get by even after taking billions in tax-payer dollars, only after a through, judicious and intelligent national debate – complete unmarked by fear-mongering – in which Americans all agreed to give over their money to that wonderful firm.
It is rough working for the government.
It is important to remember that government is capable of serving the needs of certain people — not all people, just certain people.
For the vast majority of people, government is unnecessary, wasteful, criminal, intrusive, destructive, violent, unreasonable, intractable, insatiable and corrupt.
For a select minority of people, government is the most useful tool for the creation and preservation of social status and wealth ever devised by man.
In all things, “cui bono” is the surest means for determining truth.
I’ve actually scene [sic] government officials lose their jobs over poor decisions…
Name them. I don’t believe you.
Do you know how hard is to fire a federal employee? A public school teacher? A police officer?
If a private company wants to keep an incompetent person on staff, it hurts their bottom line. When the government does it, who does it hurt?
I think as the world became more secular and less religious over the course of the 20th century people replaced the idea of God with big all powerful government, which seemed to be the most powerful thing in the universe. Now a lot of people look at government as a sort of surrogate god, capable of anything, including preventing hurricanes, keeping them safe at all costs, healing their sicknesses, etc. etc. The idea that government can’t and isn’t supposed to solve all our problems, though self evident, is almost a new and radical concept to some people.
The growth of govt. seems to be an iterative process.
Wherein the final step is the call for govt. action in response to the failure or unintended consequences of the previous govt. action.
See
Fema after Katrina
Campaign finance (a lot)
a lot of business regulation (quite a bit)
Urban planning
etc
One thing that has always confused me
Consistent Empirical findings tell us that Rent control and minimum wage in almost every case hurt the “poor”
Yet liberals are great humanitarians
and libertarians are evil bastards
bobzbob,
There might be cases where a firm “wastes” a lot of money on a proposal. This is called discovery. The difference is that in a free market firm this waste would stop once it is discovered to be a waste. The difference between economic collectivism and free market is not only the effect of profit, but also of loss. There are productive (profitable whether or not they get to keep it) enterprises even under economic collectivism, a major inefficiency is that unproductive enterprises often are not stopped.
bob,
Corporations are not really part of the private sector. Corporatism is big business and governmet in cahoots. Don’t confuse that with the free market.
See JS’s response. You are a zealot for government. You are like a die hard catholic in denial about child abuse allogations. Your benevolent government is not real.
Funny that the Reason article on progressives didn’t touch on the progressive Wilson administration’s wartime construction of a police state that included: mass arrests of antiwar dissenters on the most trivial grounds, draconian sentences for many of those dissenters and sponsorship and/or favorable treatment of mass vigilante organizations and even lynch mobs.
The whole of Waco:The Rules of Engagement is now available online:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4298137966377572665#
Uh, Nick, Bernie Madoff is in jail. He is not “sitting on a beach.” Sheesh.
Anybody who thinks there is NO accountability in the private sector should run their own business. Sure, there are the large companies that get bailed out by the feds but small companies (like mine) have to scrape through and not make mistakes. If I screw over my customers or make bad decisions I am going to lose customers and quickly go out of business. Is the DEA (or any government agency) going out of business anytime soon?
So, are you implying that, if the government didn’t hire J. C. R. Licklider, Leonard Kleinrock and Larry Roberts, who had already been working with the technologies that would evolve into the internet (prior to DARPA), then they would have given up their research and we would never have had the internet?
Uh Sydney, it’s called sarcasm ;)
Nick you are posing a counter factual. We don’t know because it didn’t happen that way. Government has occasional successes. They are pretty rare though.
No, I am asking bobzbob a yes/no question about his comment. “We” may not know the answer but bobzbob does.
War on Drugs, War on Poverty, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Social Security, US Post Office, etc. ad nauseum.
This is an interesting list. Let’s just take one of them–the US Post Office (or Postal Service, as I think it’s now called). It’s hard to deny that private companies like FedEx and UPS have performed some of the functions performed by the Postal Service more efficiently, and often at a price that rivals what the Postal Service charges for the same service. But I don’t think any company has undertaken one of the Post Office’s responsibilities–to provide regular mail delivery for virtually any address in the U.S. at a price that doesn’t seriously limit the amount of mail individuals in some rural locations would receive. And I don’t expect a private company is liable to do this, because it’s likely it’s not possible to do profitably.
It’s certainly worth asking whether that kind of mail service is something individuals should expect, or whether government should be expected to provide it. But when the Postal Service does have this mandate, it doesn’t seem particularly instructive to compare their performance with private entities that are allowed to cherry-pick the more obviously profitable and more easily accomplished aspects of mail delivery.
#38 | parse — “But I don’t think any company has undertaken one of the Post Office’s responsibilities–to provide regular mail delivery for virtually any address in the U.S. at a price that doesn’t seriously limit the amount of mail individuals in some rural locations would receive.”
Lysander Spooner came up in discussion yesterday. It is worth one’s while to learn about the man.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysander_Spooner
He directly challenged the U.S. government monopoly on first-class mail delivery, and at a lower cost.
Proving that competition is the key to reducing costs and improving efficiency, per Wikipedia: “… The lasting legacy of Spooner’s challenge to the postal service was the 3-cent stamp, adopted in response to the competition his company provided.”
Like Boyd wrote yesterday, the man is one serious pimp daddy. Who follows in his footsteps today?
For whom are these things a success? Many argued that the cash for clunkers program was a success. But, it was only a “success” for the limited number of people who bought and sold the vehicles. It was a loss for taxpayers who had to fund it but didn’t participate. And, it was harmful to used car dealers, salvage yards, and people who bought used cars or repaired their cars with used parts because they couldn’t afford new cars.
When you’re using other people’s money, you can do all sorts of things which appear to be “successful.” But not everyone benefits and eventually you run out of other people’s money, at which point the economic calamities are far worse than the supposed benefits of the “successes.”
I’m trying extremely hard not to blast you with expletives right now.
Didn’t you know that the government makes it illegal to compete with the USPS for delivering letters? When you have a government enforced monopoly, how do you know that a private company couldn’t do it better?
Your ignorance is astounding!
@Radley
I work in the government (Federal). There was a woman here who shat herself every day in her pants at her desk. Literally just sat there and took dump after dump. She did not have any physiological problem. The cleaning people refused to go into her cube and her colleagues had to live with it for at least 3 years. THREE YEARS. So, yeah. You’re correct.
Kristen….wow! lol
Boy, seems like the only way to “win” an argument with Balko about government is to post it on a different blog and ignore any responses.
And Parse, Dinauer’s argument is an unworkable paradox. We’re supposed to trust the entity that has destroyed so much wealth and ruined so many lives to make the correct decisions on how to rein in its massively wasteful spending of other peoples’ money? In Colorado, when the government cuts spending it decides to close schools before even considering anything like releasing non-violent prisoners, a shitty tactic clearly designed to frighten people out of demanding that government ever reduce its spending. Regardless of how you feel about public schools, how could you even consider trusting this unaccountable monstrosity when you see things like that? People in this country don’t trust the government because the government has never done anything to deserve our trust. You can’t paint that as a failure of the people. Or do you think they’ll get it all right this time if we just, pretty please, give them one more chance? For someone of Radley’s credentials and history, I can see why that argument wouldn’t be worth addressing, regardless of what that may say about me.
parse,
What Elliot said. My god that is one of the dumbest things I’ve ever seen written anywhere. Congratulations.
Plus if you think about the giant piece of reality you were oblivious to, it devastates the actual argument you were trying to make. Namely, that the government has a Constitutionally mandated monopoly on an actual consumer good/service (something most people will pay for happily) and they still can’t operate it without running billions of dollars in the hole.
What if the gov had a monopoly on soda? I’m sure you’d point to the amazing profits of milk distributors and call it “cherry-picking” because, how can anyone be epxected to sell Coke and make a profit. Dumbass.
But please, continue to the next item on the list you quoted.
I know it’s only Wednesday but I’m giving bobzbob the dumbest comment of the week award anyway.
“I don’t promote government failure, I expect it. And my expectations are met fairly often. What I promote is the idea that more people share my expectations, so fewer people are harmed by government failure, and so we can stop this slide toward increasingly large portions of our lives being subject to the whims, interests, and prejudices of politicians.”
This is a bit off. She wasn’t criticizing you for promoting government failure, per se.
“But if you actually want to reduce the size of government in the real world, then shouldn’t you be promoting trust in government which, ironically, appears to make it easier to reduce government spending?”
So her problem is with your promoting distrust, not promoting failure. I think that when you promote “the idea that more people share [your] expectations [of gov't failure]“, that it’s fair to characterize this as promoting distrust in government.
Now, I share your distrust in government, and think that distrust of government under many circumstances is wholly justified and healthy, which is where we disagree with Dinauer. But she wasn’t accusing you of what you thought she was accusing you.
There are a lot of people who believe that only the gov can deliver mail, either categorically or partially to certain types of areas.
This ignores the historical record.
First example: Henry Wells started a Philly to NYC express where he charged and made a profit at 6 cents a letter. The Post Office charged 25 cents a letter and was slower than Wells’ service. The charged four times as much and took twice as long. The PO finally reduced their rates and with taxes on the private carriers actually had a competitive price. Because of the competition the PO had to reduce their fee to three cents that is 1/8 of what their highest charge, it was this that finally regained their market share. Of course this was subsidized and was not a free-market price.
Private carrying of letters was illegal, however as fast as US officials arrested his couriers, private citizens bailed them out.
Second example: There were over 240 express services with connections in Boston It is estimated that in 1845 private expresses carried up to 1/3 of the 42.5 million letters carried in this country. That’s 15 million pieces of mail And in some cases, (NYC to San Francisco by streamer) because of gov taxes it did cost more to ship a letter privately, millions of folks still chose to pay a higher fee just so they could avoid the PO’s questionable service. The PO still charged three cents Wells charged 12 1/2 cents for the NYC-SF run so millions of people paid an EXTRA 9 1/2 cents to avoid the PO.
So if private expresses could capture one third of the mail service while having to charge artificially higher rates there is no reason the could not do all of it without those extra fees.
Third example: Buffalo NY was considered to be on the edge of civilization at the time yet they had regular mail service. If you were a gold miner in the wilds of California you could get regular mail service. There were men who specialized in delivering to the boonies. Did it cost more? Of course, it did. Considering the risk the carriers undertook and the time it took of course it cost more. But was it a good value? Yes, because people still paid the rates. There were over 500 private expresses working in California at that time. The PO had one office in SF and one in Sacramento. That’s it. So much for the viability of a gov run service to the frontier.
Let’s say you lived in the boonies. Now, in rural areas there was not a lot of, or perhaps any, house-to-house mail delivery on a day-to-day basis. You would have to go into whatever hamlet or village you lived near to pick up your mail. Or if the postman in town knew of someone going out your way they would give them your mail to drop off.
Was this as convenient as what we enjoy, no. Did it matter? No. Would it matter today? No. Look, if a person chooses to live out in the wilds certain things are going to cost more. You cannot expect the rest of us to subsidize your lifestyle choices. Of course there were certain benefits to living out there, none of which you would share with the rest of us, right? So don’t complain. All things considered you live there because you figure there is a net benefit to you, a higher cost of mail delivery is just one of many things that factor into that decision.
Mail got to the rural areas sometimes through regular routes by express companies but sometimes it was an ad hoc arrangement. If you knew you were traveling to a place, you could make the rounds of express companies and let them know and then they would pay you to drop off mail in the town you were going to and maybe even in the towns you passed through. This might even be enough to pay your train fare and other costs of your journey. So there was no shortage of folks willing to carry mail.
Next-to-Lastly, it took several Acts of Congress (an alternate meaning to that is someone gets screwed) and a few court decisions to finally entrench the gov monopoly on mail service. The gov could not out-compete the private carriers even when the PO charged artificially low rates and forced the private carriers to charge artificially high rates. So they used force. So the viability of a gov monopoly postal system has been demolished and debunked.
Lastly, should not individuals be able to choose who they want to do business with? Is that not the most moral and ethical manner to conduct ourselves as a society. As a free-market anarchist I’m all for disbanding the USPS of course but that does not even need to happen. Just remove all the regulations that restricts who can deliver mail and at what price, and remove the subsidies and bureaucratic nonsense that the USPS has to deal with from the USPS and then see who wins.
To give the current USPS workers an incentive offer them shares in the revenue or even outright ownership through giving them first dibs via an internal IPO. It would be very interesting to see just how much value the current employees place on the entity they work for.
IOW, Mori Dinauer is talking out of hre (his) ass with a heads I win, tails you lose argument.
Cynical, I knew something about Spooner, but not the postal service. Thanks for the link. I bow to the greater knowledge with others regarding the postal service monopoly. Warren, your details in particular were fascinating.
Brandon, I wasn’t arguing that Dinauer’s argument was correct, but noting that Radley responded to it but didn’t engage it.
The education I receive on this site is better than the one I got in 12 years of public school. Throw in college too.
Nick, I’ll pick two others on the list whose validity I think is questionable: the War on Drugs and Vietnam.
I’m not convinced that the failure of the War on Drugs is due to government inefficiency; it’s that the very idea of a War on Drugs is ill-conceived and a repugnant infringement on individual liberty. Are you suggesting that private contractors could successfully eliminate drug usage through more efficient attempts at interdiction? And would you have happy if they did?
It’s true that the U.S. government lost the war in Vietnam, but the North Vietnamese government won the war, so I’m not sure how this demonstrates that government, per se, is incapable of solving problems.
“it’s that the very idea of a War on Drugs is ill-conceived and a repugnant infringement on individual liberty.”
And who’s idea was this exactly? The only people who can truly infringe on individual liberty is the government, pretty much by definition.
But besides that, you don’t have to be convinced that government inefficiency caused the failure in the war on drugs, but rather that the government has been disgracefully inefficient in fighting this war, and that the war is a failure. The quote you cited was a response to whether or not the government is usually successful at what it does. So you’re really moving the goal post when you concede it’s a failure but then come up with some mealy-mouthed argument as to some other crap. Mightily apropos of your handle though!
And who’s idea was this exactly? The only people who can truly infringe on individual liberty is the government, pretty much by definition.
You’ve never been held at gunpoint, then.
“You’ve never been held at gunpoint, then.”
Are you being held at gunpoint right now and being told not to respond substantively to any opposing arguments?
The point was and is that a world where the government stops locking you up for doing drugs, but where everyone else doesn’t sell you drugs, tells you all the time to stop, judges you when you do use and/or offers you tons of help in quitting (or nay combination thereof) does not, in any way, infringe on anyone’s personal liberty.
Example 1 of government being efficient at destruction of values.
I’m the one who listed Vietnam and the WoD. The question of a private organization enforcing drug prohibition is moot. As you point out, there’s no justification to punish adults who do no harm to others.
But you need to examine whether the government is actually accomplishing the goals it purports to achieve via the DEA: reducing drug trafficking, reducing drug usage, reducing drug-related violence, keeping drugs out of the hands of children. For all the billions of taxpayer dollars spent on that agency, its law enforcement activities have utterly failed at achieving any of those goals. Even worse: they are making violent suppliers richer (how many legal alcohol distributors make that kind of money or have any motive to involve terrorists or other violent murderers?); they increase violence at the street level (how many liquor store owners shoot each other over territory?); they increase theft and muggings (how many alcoholics burglarize or mug people to get a bottle?); and they make it easier for children to buy drugs (how many drug dealers card buyers?).
Voters are afraid to elect any politician who isn’t “tough on drugs” (with a few exceptions on very limited easing of marijuana laws, only in the past decade or so). So, there’s no motive for politicians to end the insane WoD.
As your question illustrates, it makes no sense that there would be a private enterprise alternative. Without the monopoly on the use of force that makes government government, you couldn’t get away with such a thing.
Example 2 of government being efficient at destruction of values.
Hanoi was effective at: (1) taking money and matériel from Beijing and Moscow, (2) stealing property from North Vietnam (DRV) residents in the so-called “land reform” of the 50s, (3) taking government ownership of French assets, regardless of whether individuals may have had a more reasonable claim, (4) ruthlessly controlling DRV residents via terror, violence, and “reeducation camps”, and (5) forcing DRV residents to make massive sacrifices with the strategy of making the US get tired and go home. I could list everything they did to the victims of their conquest, but you get the picture.
Many of the US leaders knew they had a failed strategy, but pursued it anyway. They allowed tens of thousands of casualties and billions of dollars to be wasted, because they lacked the moral fiber to admit failure.
Had the US government stopped the communist aggression, it would only be a qualified “success” to some people. It would not have been a success for all of the casualties among the civilians and draftees, or for those who lost their freedoms or property in the process.
The point was and is that a world where the government stops locking you up for doing drugs, but where everyone else doesn’t sell you drugs, tells you all the time to stop, judges you when you do use and/or offers you tons of help in quitting (or nay combination thereof) does not, in any way, infringe on anyone’s personal liberty.
But how do you get from here to the only people who can truly infringe on individual liberty is the government, pretty much by definition. ?
Kristin:
“I work in the government (Federal). There was a woman here who shat herself every day in her pants at her desk. Literally just sat there and took dump after dump. She did not have any physiological problem. The cleaning people refused to go into her cube and her colleagues had to live with it for at least 3 years. THREE YEARS.”
I think you win the smelliest co-worker award. Forever.
A dubious distinktion indeed.
bobzbob,
Yesterday I was combing the hair of this lady I have chained up in my basement. She now has combed hair.
That’s all you get. Figure it out for yourself.
“Who will provide a service no one cares enough to pay for?” –said Someone
The real answer is “the government”. There are plenty of people in the US who do not get mail service. Instead, their only option is a PO Box (which is an easily reproduced service by private enterprise).
Instead of asking how the free market would provide, realize the free market would probably say “Fuck that! No way I’m doing that stupid shit no one wants*.”
*I define “wants” by “willing to pay enough to have the service provided, so I’ve gamed the system a bit…just like Congress does.
It’s funny to think that Clinton was the best Republican president we’ve had in recent memory.
OK, so government isn’t great. But it’s a step up from feudal serfdom. We are making progress folks. Show some optimism.
parse,
You have resorted to deliberately missing the point for lack of an actual ability to respond to what is truly being discussed.
But fine: I could explain it at length, but in short, “restricting individual liberty” is more than just any action that stops someone else from doing anything they want. Yes putting a gun to someone’s head or offering someone tons of money to do or not do certain things can be said to restrict one’s freedoms, but “individual liberty” is really more about a recognizable autonomy. That is, going into a situation with the understanding that a person can do what she wants without *fear* of consequences, at the outset. This type of freedom necessarily involves the potential for abuse, such as threatening others with guns. But, freedom means rights, it doesn’t mean a total avoidance of all possible negative consequences and restrictions, and rights, as a matter of policy, only exist with respect to government.
You have revealed yourself as someone who truly sees no immediate, per se, moral distinction between the acts of government and the acts of private autonomous people. Sadly for you, though fortunately for the rest of humanity, the DoI and Constitution are heavily based on that idea and use it as a central premise in the philosophies they espouse.
For the usefulness of a government, you can read Montesquieu, Locke, or Rousseau, these are some bases about politics which I enjoy to use.
The feudal system was government.
Whenever you have one group of people, who assert their authority to maintain a monopoly on the use of aggressive force to make other people do what they want, you have a government. From politburos to warlords, they’re all about using force, instead of reason.
And for the limits of a free-market politics, Adam Smith is also very interesting, if only some were reading about the limits he is giving there should be less problems.
You must make a distinction between coercion by the use of aggressive force and persuasion by reason. Persuasion, whether it’s a sales pitch or a stack of money, doesn’t restrict freedom. The person listening or eyeing the stack of money still has the freedom to choose to say no.
#69
I’m emphasizing predictability and the effect that has on freedom. Policies encourage or discourage certain behavior *in advance* and thus have a large effect on freedom. You *might* be taken hostage by bank robbers when you go to the bank, or there might be a law that makes it a crime to enter a bank at all, and you will be arrested. Those are two very different things.
Elliot, I thought feudalism was a network of contractual agreements between lords and vassals. I don’t think a single entity had a monopoly on the use of force in the feudal system–lords granted fiefs to their vassals in return for a pledge by the vassals of military support. A lord didn’t have a monopoly on the use of force–he had only the force he was able to contract for. Have I got something wrong?
Really? How did Radley fail. One part of Dinauer’s response was that people like Radley should promote faith in government, but Radley does address that,
Blindly promoting faith in government to get government given this dynamic is moronic.
Should read as,
In case you love math for the sake of math, using public data to carry out your “correlation between %GDP and Trust”, we only have to wait until Federal Gov’t as a % of GDP hits somewhere around 31% (we’re at 25% now) to hit 0 trust. Don’t count on that actually playing out…