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Manufacturing Failure

by Christopher Chantrill
February 11, 2007 at 11:23 pm

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IT WAS TWENTY years ago that we learned of “A Nation at Risk.” The problems in our education system were imperiling our national future, wrote the National Commission on Excellence in Education. But since then nothing much has happened. If anything, the education system is worse. Yet the US economy has kept its place as the most productive in the world.

It’s the same with government welfare. Ten years ago the nation drastically reformed welfare, setting strict time limits for welfare recipients. Liberals fainted all over the place in Victorian hysterics, yet the welfare caseload dropped by 50 percent and the social fabric was demonstrably strengthened.

Then there is health care. We spend about 50 percent more on “bio-medicine” than our European friends, yet life expectancy in the United States is, if anything, lower.

What is going on?

Theodore Dalrymple provided the answer recently in City Journal for Winter 2007. In “How Not To Do It.” He wondered about the staggering incompetence and waste of the public service in Britain. Everywhere you looked you saw expensive failure. Yet nothing ever changed. How could such incompetence continue? What did it mean?

Surprisingly, the African nation of Tanzania provided the answer. Under the incompetent rule of Julius Nyerere, it became a country so poor that:

Nothing, not even the most basic commodity such as soap or salt, was available to the general population... But then the thought dawned on me, admittedly with embarrassing slowness, that a man who had been in power virtually unopposed for nearly a quarter of a century could not be called incompetent[.]

Dalrymple’s error was in supposing that “competence” meant actually improving the lives of the people. Not at all. A competent ruler is the one who manages to stay in power.

The simplest way to stay in power has always been to operate a top-down patronage system that distributes jobs and pensions in return for grateful votes. But the welfare state has an additional element. From the bottom up it supplies the failure and helplessness that creates the moral imperative for government expansion and the accretion of more power to the progressive class.

We could steal a page out of Noam Chomsky’s book and say that it is a system for “manufacturing failure.”

But there is an additional factor at work. It is the real stroke of genius. The major theater of operations for progressive government—health, education, and welfare—are not critical areas of national well-being. Gross, persistent, large-scale failure in these government programs will not bring down the nation.

We have had failure in education for at least a generation. What is the result? The US economy remains the most productive in the world. And the people most damaged by defective education, inner-city African Americans, continue to vote in overwhelming numbers for the welfare-state party.

We have had forty years of massive government intervention in welfare. It has utterly wasted the poor, breaking up their authentic culture and multiplying social pathology. But apart from the poor and the votes of an army of grateful social workers, nothing much has changed. The poor and the social workers continue to vote for the welfare-state party.

We spend about 15 percent of GDP on health care. It delivers millions of jobs to union nurses, nurses aides, and billions in research dollars to the universities. But the contribution of big-dollar bio-medicine to health and longevity is tenuous. As James C Riley. states in Rising Life Expectancy: A Global History,

[a] number of other countries, among them Costa Rica, Jamaica, and Cuba, reported life expectancies nearly as high as in the United States on modest investments.

But millions of people believe that a system of expensive bio-medicine controlled by the government is the very essence of a compassionate society. And every one of them votes for the welfare-state party.

It is all very well for Cal Thomas to grouse that “Democrats never have enough of our money to spend on their favorite entitlement programs -- the ones that keep them in office.” So Democrats get to buy votes with taxpayers’ money. What’s not to like?

But imagine an America in which every conservative and Republican no longer believed the Democratic mantra that a nation without government education was a Nation At Risk?

It would be an America that wasn’t quite so frightened about what the Democrats would do if we broke one of their toys.

It was Keynes who argued that the power of special interests was greatly overrated. It was ideas that mattered. “Indeed the world is ruled by little else.”

Suppose people got the idea that you could flush the average failing government program down the toilet and nobody would notice? After all, they’d say, all government programs fail; that’s how the system works. It’s all about the patronage, stupid.

Christopher Chantrill blogs at americanmanifestobook.blogspot.com.

Buy his Road to the Middle Class.

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Responsibility

Seeckt: "to make of each individual member of the army a soldier who, in character, capability, and knowledge, is self-reliant, self-confident, dedicated, and joyful in taking responsibility [verantwortungsfreudig] as a man and a soldier."
MacGregor Knox et. al., The dynamics of military revolution, 1300-2050

Living the Virtues

When recurrently the tradition of the virtues is regenerated, it is always in everyday life, it is always through the engagement by plain persons in a variety of practices, including those of making and sustaining families and households, schools, clinics, and local forms of political community.
Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue

Moral Imperatives of Modern Culture

These emerge out of long-standing moral notions of freedom, benevolence, and the affirmation of ordinary life... I have been sketching a schematic map... [of] the moral sources [of these notions]... the original theistic grounding for these standards... a naturalism of disengaged reason, which in our day takes scientistic forms, and a third family of views which finds its sources in Romantic expressivism, or in one of the modernist successor visions.
Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self

US Life in 1842

Families helped each other putting up homes and barns. Together, they built churches, schools, and common civic buildings. They collaborated to build roads and bridges. They took pride in being free persons, independent, and self-reliant; but the texture of their lives was cooperative and fraternal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Society and State

For [the left] there is only the state and the individual, nothing in between. No family to rely on, no friend to depend on, no community to call on. No neighbourhood to grow in, no faith to share in, no charities to work in. No-one but the Minister, nowhere but Whitehall, no such thing as society - just them, and their laws, and their rules, and their arrogance.
David Cameron, Conference Speech 2008

Faith and Politics

As far as the Catholic Church is concerned, the principal focus of her interventions in the public arena is the protection and promotion of the dignity of the person, and she is thereby consciously drawing particular attention to principles which are not negotiable... [1.] protection of life in all its stages, from the first moment of conception until natural death; [2.] recognition and promotion of the natural structure of the family... [3.] the protection of the right of parents to educate their children.
Pope Benedict XVI, Speech to European Peoples Party, 2006

Never Trust Experts

No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by the experience of life as that you should never trust experts. If you believe doctors, nothing is wholesome: if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent: if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe. They all require their strong wine diluted by a very large admixture of insipid common sense.
Lord Salisbury, “Letter to Lord Lytton”

Conservatism's Holy Grail

What distinguishes true Conservatism from the rest, and from the Blair project, is the belief in more personal freedom and more market freedom, along with less state intervention... The true Third Way is the Holy Grail of Tory politics today - compassion and community without compulsion.
Minette Marrin, The Daily Telegraph

Class War

In England there were always two sharply opposed middle classes, the academic middle class and the commercial middle class. In the nineteenth century, the academic middle class won the battle for power and status... Then came the triumph of Margaret Thatcher... The academics lost their power and prestige and... have been gloomy ever since.
Freeman Dyson, “The Scientist as Rebel”

Government Expenditure

The Union publishes an exact return of the amount of its taxes; I can get copies of the budgets of the four and twenty component states; but who can tell me what the citizens spend in the administration of county and township?
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

Conservatism

Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority — the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ‘we should...’.
Danny Kruger, On Fraternity

Postmodernism

A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ’merely relative’, is asking you not to believe him. So don’t.
Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy

presented by Christopher Chantrill

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