Government And Failure

EVER NOTICED the difference between a politician running for office and a politician in office? When running for election, the politician will say anything to get elected. In the last few months we’ve seen the Kerry campaign provide us with a textbook example of this. Every week, it seems, the campaign tries out a new theme. Kerry is for the war. Then he is against it. He would have taken out Saddam Hussein. Then it’s all a mistake. He’s reporting for duty, surrounded by his band of brothers. Then he’s going to get us out of Vietnam, er, make that Iraq. He’ll do anything to get traction with the electorate.

But when politicians are actually governing, then they will say anything to avoid doing anything. Is Social Security going broke? Nothing can be done: but we will protect it with a “lockbox.” Are the cities terrorized by teenage hoodlums? Nothing can be done: the cops are racist. Johnny can’t read? Nothing can be done: the schools are underfunded.

There’s a simple reason for this. When running for office, the politician must win or he is history. But once in office he gets to merge himself with sacred symbols of nationhood and community. Social Security is “ours.” Youthful monsters are “our” future. And everybody supports “our” teachers. Governments have learned, over the ages, to hide behind these sacred symbols. That way they can accuse their critics of profaning the sacred symbols instead of answering their criticism.

When government screws up, it usually manages to blame the corporations, and the people line up to cheer. When the US government screwed up the economy in the 1970s with wage and price controls, people were happy to blame the oil companies for gas lines and soaring gas prices. When the government of California screwed up electric regulation in the 1990s, people lined up to blame Enron but kept silent about municipal electric utilities in the Pacific Northwest that were price gouging with the best of them.

Of course, when government really screws up, then people blame capitalism itself. In the 1930s, when the government suits made mistake after mistake, committing wrong on wrong, by reducing the money supply, allowing banks to fail, keeping failing businesses alive, raising tax rates, boosting import tariffs, and creating a corporative state with the fascist NRA, who did people blame? Why, they blamed Wall Street speculators, heartless bankers, and capitalism itself! By 1939, after Franklin D. Roosevelt had succeeded against all odds in prolonging the Great Depression for ten years, he was reckoned a national hero.

We want government to attack problems, and so they do, happily attacking them for years and years without effect. But corporations are different. From them we demand satisfaction or our money back. Why do we tolerate this double standard? Who knows?

But the lesson is obvious. When we want to attack problems, there is nothing better than getting a government involved. But we should understand that the problem would never get solved. For when we charge a government with a job, all we do is appropriate our money for people to work on the problem. Chances are they will discover that the problem is much bigger than anyone imagines, and that they will need more money to make a dent in the problem.

When we want to solve a problem we should charge it to a corporation. Fed up with high whale oil prices? Here’s a young bookkeeper, John D. Rockefeller, who has been doing a modest trade in Pennsylvania mineral oil and has some ideas about “standardizing” the oil to make it safe. Want a car in every garage? Here’s crackpot mechanic Henry Ford with an idea to apply the methods of the meatpacking industry to automobile manufacture. Want to get a package delivered coast-to-coast overnight? Here’s crazy Fred Smith with an idea to fly the packages to Memphis, sort them, and then fly them on to their destinations in the morning.

Then there’s Sam Walton and Wal-mart. They ought to build a mausoleum for that guy in Tiananmen Square next to Chairman Mao. In his endless quest to deliver everyday low prices he’s done as much as anyone to get the Chinese people off their knees and into prosperity and security.

Government is in the business of protecting a terrified people and leading them to safety. If it ever did get them into the Promised Land, it would be out of a job. But corporations, the creatures of double-entry bookkeeping and limited liability, are in the business of customer satisfaction. Again and again and again.

Christopher Chantrill blogs at americanmanifestobook.blogspot.com.

Buy his Road to the Middle Class.

print view

To comment on this article at American Thinker click here.

To email the author, click here.

TAGS

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

Home

American Manifesto

Chapters

Chappies

roadtothemiddleclass

presented by Christopher Chantrill

Follow @chrischantrill • Contact