The big picture

[sophia jane]

Admittedly, I'm a liberal. I'm also entirely too addicted to the news of late, so maybe I'm just becoming more aware of things that have always happened. Or perhaps, there' just more corruption to report. Who knows.

Anyway- in recent weeks there have been numerous stories about problems with the Bush Admin. We've got:
the Walter Reed problem
the problem of the entire VA system
dismissal of 8 US attornies for no particular reason
the conviction of Scooter Libby
the realization that the FBI has been abusing the Patriot Act (SHOCK!)
video tapes for the Padilla case mysteriously disappearing

Have I missed some?

So we have all of these things, all of which point right back to Bush and his Cabinet and their total disregard for the way our government is supposed to run, and I have to say why is their not more of a collective ass kicking going on? We have all these little sub-committee investigations and reports happening, which is good, but it seems like, when you look at the whole picture, there's a really frightening trend happening and I'm amazed that more people aren't totally incensed? Has the general public just become that ignorant and indifferent that no one is piecing it together?
Thoughts?

 

[Roxanne Appleby]

If you imagine that corruption and malfeasance is limited to this adminstration, or the previous one or any other, you wind up engaging in perpetual and meaningless tail chasing. These things are endemic to government itself, because the incentives in government are all skewed in ways that either encourage them or provide no check on them.

Government at all levels in the U.S. consumes something like $5 trillion annually. The incentives toward honesty, prudence and frugality are weak. They amount to periodic elections in which all a crook has to do is bamboozle 50 percent plus one to vote for him. Consider the kind of people who are attracted to such an enterprise. Even those acting out of good will are affected by the skewed incentives. All are self-interested actors who look out for number one first. Not to the exclusion of all else, but first.

That is the big picture. "Reform" is mostly an illusion, and usually a scam. Dishonesty and disappointment are the hallmarks and intrinsic nature of the beast, and it will never change. If you want less of it, choose a smaller beast. That's your only real choice.

I have written about this in greater depth in the following posts in the Obama thread, specifically, those who look to government as a source of "hope" will always and inevitably find themselves in the position of Charlie Brown after trying to kick Lucy's football - flat on their backs, wind knocked out:

http://forum.literotica.com/showpost.php?p=21391518&postcount=144
http://forum.literotica.com/showpost.php?p=21391974&postcount=146


PS. Is it possible to be a liberal without being a statist? In the current era the two are taken to be the same. They are not. True liberals should hope that they are not, as suggested the referenced posts.

 

[Jenny_Jackson]

You missed that great tid-bit about (do I dare say this?) Virgy Arthur wanting to dig up Anna Nichol Smith's kid and moving him to Texas so she could dig up Anna Nichol Smith and have her buried next to her son.

You missed Ann Coulter's latest faux pax.

You missed Bill O'Riley claiming MSNBC's reporter in Bagdad is liberally biased when the reporting was exactly the same as O'Riley's.

You missed Newt Gingrich's admission that he was porking some mentally retarded woman during the Clinton Impeachmnet. (She must have been mentally retarded to screw him.)

You missed FOX news confusing Osama with OBAMA. Appearantly they think the most wanted terrorist in the world is running for US President.

The list goes on...

 

[rgraham666]

I don't know if you've noticed, Roxanne, but practically everybody in politics these days comes from the corporate world.

And the corporate world is thoroughly corrupt. Not only are the people in the upper levels paid far beyond their worth, but they reward themselves with all kinds of off book pluses like travel paid for, cars and meals bought, stock options used as 'incentives'. Why should we be surprised if they continue acting in this way when they go into public service?

And what exactly is a 'statist' other than a word used for anarchist propaganda? Government is a tool, just as business is. Like all tools they have no ethical component. If either is used for unethical purposes it's the user's fault not the tool's.

Furthermore, we get a lot of worth for that five trillion dollars. We get roads built and maintained to a high standard, a fairly good public education system, an efficient and effective law enforcement and justice system, a very good armed forces that does an excellent job keeping us safe.

Why should it be cheap? What makes you think it would be better to hand these things to the private sector? Is there any guarantee, other than in rhetoric, that moving these important things out of the public's purview would make them more effective or cheaper?

 

[Huckleman2000]

Well said, Rob!

I'd also add that the whole VA/Walter Reed thing was actually caused by trying to 'outsource' the running of the system into the private sector.

So, this administration took something, military service, where the incentives include such abstract and even noble concepts as patriotism, service, and self-sacrifice, and reduced the care of those injured in the course of their duties to simple dollars and cents.

Talk about perverse incentives!

 

[3113]

Bush Admin. We've got:
the Walter Reed problem
the problem of the entire VA system
dismissal of 8 US attornies for no particular reason
the conviction of Scooter Libby
the realization that the FBI has been abusing the Patriot Act (SHOCK!)
video tapes for the Padilla case mysteriously disappearing

Left-wing propaganda. Try watching Fox News instead. You'll see that everything Bush and company are doing and have ever done is good and right. All's well with the world and with the U.S....except for the liberal media.

 

[elsol]

I love both Roxanne and Rob's position.

Such hopelessness...

 

[Zeb_Carter]

You also missed the one where Nancy Pelosi appointed that corrupt Congressman from LA., the one that was found to have $90,000 of bribe money in his refridgerato, to the council of Homeland security.

 

[Huckleman2000]

You also missed the one where Nancy Pelosi appointed that corrupt Congressman from LA., the one that was found to have $90,000 of bribe money in his refridgerato, to the council of Homeland security.

Oooh, that devious Nancy Pelosi! Putting the re-elected Congressman from New Orleans on the committee that oversees much of the Katrina recovery effort! Scandalous!

I'm no fan of "Cool Cash" Jefferson, but it takes some gall for the party who put Tom DeLay up for the Ethics Committee to squeal about this. I mean, she has to put him somewhere.

 

[Belegon]

Oooh, that devious Nancy Pelosi! Putting the re-elected Congressman from New Orleans on the committee that oversees much of the Katrina recovery effort! Scandalous!

I'm no fan of "Cool Cash" Jefferson, but it takes some gall for the party who put Tom DeLay up for the Ethics Committee to squeal about this. I mean, she has to put him somewhere.

Since when has the Repug party been short on gall? It's perspective they're lacking...

 

[JamesSD]

You missed that great tid-bit about (do I dare say this?) Virgy Arthur wanting to dig up Anna Nichol Smith's kid and moving him to Texas so she could dig up Anna Nichol Smith and have her buried next to her son.

You missed Ann Coulter's latest faux pax.

You missed Bill O'Riley claiming MSNBC's reporter in Bagdad is liberally biased when the reporting was exactly the same as O'Riley's.

You missed Newt Gingrich's admission that he was porking some mentally retarded woman during the Clinton Impeachmnet. (She must have been mentally retarded to screw him.)

You missed FOX news confusing Osama with OBAMA. Appearantly they think the most wanted terrorist in the world is running for US President.

The list goes on...

I would separate serious issues of the elected administration from faux pax's involving the right wing media. I'm really pissed, and a little scared by Alberto Gonzales and the FBI illegally spying on American citizens. Ann Coulter is an idiot, and I have no idea why anyone would listen to her, but she does have freedom of speech, and is a private citizen.

The FBI think freaks me out so much I can barely think about it. I've never liked Gonzales, and at this point I think he has to go.

 

[Roxanne Appleby]

I don't know if you've noticed, Roxanne, but practically everybody in politics these days comes from the corporate world.

And the corporate world is thoroughly corrupt. Not only are the people in the upper levels paid far beyond their worth, but they reward themselves with all kinds of off book pluses like travel paid for, cars and meals bought, stock options used as 'incentives'. Why should we be surprised if they continue acting in this way when they go into public service?

And what exactly is a 'statist' other than a word used for anarchist propaganda? Government is a tool, just as business is. Like all tools they have no ethical component. If either is used for unethical purposes it's the user's fault not the tool's.

Furthermore, we get a lot of worth for that five trillion dollars. We get roads built and maintained to a high standard, a fairly good public education system, an efficient and effective law enforcement and justice system, a very good armed forces that does an excellent job keeping us safe.

Why should it be cheap? What makes you think it would be better to hand these things to the private sector? Is there any guarantee, other than in rhetoric, that moving these important things out of the public's purview would make them more effective or cheaper?

Indeed, I don't disagree with much of what you say about government (although your description of the private sector is a cartoon caricature.) Which just proves that I am not an anarchist, and that you have focused on the things that along with a military are perhaps the core government function, which are courts and law enforcement.

The other items you cite are hardly at the top of the objectionable list. Roads could be done by the private sector, but I don't have any huge problem with government doing it - I accept that they skim around 10-15 percent for things I am not friendly towards, mainly public transortation subsidies, much of which goes to huge boondoggles and corrupt public employees unions, but so be it. Public education is not "fairly good" if you live in a big city in the U.S., where it is abominable, and it's mediocre everywhere else. A voucher system giving parents choice would deliver much better outcomes, but it would still be financed by government (taxpayers), and although breaking up the public school/teachers union monopoly would save a lot of money, it would still be expensive. The to-the-death resistance of the public education "blob" to any real reform like this is a classic case study of much of what is wrong with government as a whole, actually.

So we move on to two other areas - the welfare state, and the regulatory state. I said what I think about the first in the posts referenced in my first post in this thread. In the other, I don't have time to go into chapter and verse, but you have perhaps heard of the "iron triangle" - the cozy relationships that exist between agencies, key legislators and the regulated industries? It is a rent seekers dream, everyone is getting fat, and the public interest be damned. Then there are things like the US Department of Commerce - in many areas an ongoing criminal enterprise.

I just don't have time to go on, so I'll just say this: The whole thing is so huge that no one has a clue of all that goes on, but much less of it has to do with the public interest than anyone in the general public can imagine. A statist is a person who ignores that reality, ignores things like inner city public schools and Kelo decisions, and seeks to insert this enterprise into ever more areas of life. It is someone who somehow thinks decisions made by politicians and bureaucrats are superior to those made by individuals and businesses. In all cases these decisions are made by self interested actors whose first interest is looking out for number one. Not their only interest, mind you, but their first interest. The difference is, the politicians and bureaucrats lie about that. Private individuals and businesses are honest about it.

Here's one way the different incentive structures play out: As citizens we expect to be lied to and disappointed by government. As consumers, we expect to be delighted by products and services provided by private businesses. Compare a visit to the Department of Motor Vehicles or any government bureaucracy to a visit to Target or the supermarket. In that comparison is the essence of what distinguishes the institututions of government from those of civil society.

 

[sophia jane]

I would separate serious issues of the elected administration from faux pax's involving the right wing media. I'm really pissed, and a little scared by Alberto Gonzales and the FBI illegally spying on American citizens. Ann Coulter is an idiot, and I have no idea why anyone would listen to her, but she does have freedom of speech, and is a private citizen.

The FBI think freaks me out so much I can barely think about it. I've never liked Gonzales, and at this point I think he has to go.

I completely agree with you on this. The stuff happening within the government is much scarier than Coulter's inanity. The FBI misusing the Patriot Act isn't surprising; in fact, it was widely predicted by all of the people who came out against the Act to begin with. The Patriot Act itself scares me, and that the FBI is admitting misuse means (to me) that there are much, much deeper misuses that we'll never hear about. Between that and the DOJ dismissal of the attornies and the handling of the evidence in the Padilla case, I see a total disregard for law. It scares the hell out of me that we have two more years of this.

 

[Roxanne Appleby]

It scares the hell out of me that we have two more years of this.

You are an optimist: We have a lifetime more of it. It's the nature of the beast, dear. In the main, in the area of the security apparatuses of government, it's no worse now than it's ever been. I will not get into pointless "he said, she said" comparisons of this vs other adminstrations by naming specifics, but will just ask you to think of FBI abuses of recent and more distant decades.

 

[Huckleman2000]

[snip]...Compare a visit to the Department of Motor Vehicles or any government bureaucracy to a visit to Target or the supermarket. In that comparison is the essence of what distinguishes the institututions of government from those of civil society.

And in that comparison is the essence of what Libertarianism gets utterly and profoundly wrong.

No one goes to the DMV because they want to. For a number of very good reasons (including the protection of a marketplace for motor vehicles), you have to go to the DMV. Since it's part of government, the incentive is that it should be run as efficiently as possible. Anyone wishing to run an efficient production line knows that you need to manage the input so as to have a constant backlog. If you don't have a backlog, you have the production line sitting idle. I had to go to the DMV recently, to get new plates after I moved from another state. I was in and out in less than an hour. While I was there, they had an aniimated sign that would show news headlines interspersed with short ads for car dealers, insurance companies, etc. This provided both a distraction from waiting and a source of advertising income for the facility. The workers were pleasant and efficient (more or less), knew how to handle the different licensing procedures, and had computers that made them more productive. I was really quite pleased with the whole experience. I didn't feel like my taxes were being mis-spent, and I got done in a reasonable amount of time.

 

[cumallday]

It's a precarious world to navigate. As we do so we are faced with an unexpected and frightening realization: the information we rely on is confusing, full of uncertainty, and fundamentally distorted. Inevitably, in our search for answers, we stumble. And more often than not it feels as though we are meant to stumble.

The stories get twisted, the lessons lost in the fog of mental pollution produced by the multi-million dollar marketing industry, and in the bias of the mega-corporate press. Are we really expected to filter the science from the science for hire, the news from the PR, the reality from the hype? What exactly are the root causes of terrorism, global warming, depression? Here's Tom with the weather.

 

[Roxanne Appleby]

SJ, as I have suggested, looking at the foibles of any particular administration and imagining that when the next takes over all will be righted is a pointless exercise. I'm going to post a couple longish articles in subsequent posts. One of them offers a hopeful vision of something different. The other graphically describes what statism really is about and where it leads.

First, let me set things up by brining in the awful tragedy of that little boy who died this week from an out-of-control infection that began as simple impacted tooth. It was the occasion of some cheap and pointless US bashing here, but here's the dirty little secret: There is not a health care system in the world that could have saved that boy. Before I explain why, let me give some details.

The boy's family was on Medicaid, the government run health care system for the poor. Medicaid absorbs almost one quarter of all state budgets - it's neck and neck with K-12 education. The feds kick in around 60 to 65 percent of the cost on top of that. This is a very costly program. There's a perennial debate that takes place in state legislatures about how to control that cost. Republicans want to kick off certain populations, like adults between 18 and 21, or people who earn over 150 percent of the poverty level. Democrats want to expand covered populations, and pay less to providers. The amount currently paid to providers is around 60-70 percent of market rates, so providers can be hard to find. Not impossible, but hard. That was the proximate cause of the death of that little boy. This took place in Maryland, by the way, a liberal and wealthy state whose Medicaid program is probably as generous as any.

I think the real cause of this tragedy was that the boy’s household was part of "underclass," a segment of society whose hallmark is destructive behavior. Don't get me wrong, I'm not scolding the individual members of that class - they are clueless victims more than anything. There are no simplistic answers, like "get a job," or spend more on government programs. The government hasn't a clue how to "save" these people either. Versions of every program you can think of have been tried , and they fail because they are all mismatched with the characteristics of the underclass. Job training? Unemployment in the underclass is not caused by lack of jobs or of job skills, but by the inability to get up every morning and go to work. A homesteading act? The lack of home ownership is not caused by the inability to save money from meager earnings, but because the concept of thrift is alien. You name it, we've tried it. It doesn't work with the underclass.

Yet as one of the articles I will post puts it, "Impoverished and degraded as they might be, they (the underclass) are nonetheless essential to the whole (statist) system, for their existence provides an ideological proof of the necessity of providential government in the first place, as well as justifying many employment opportunities in themselves."

As long as an underclass exists, it will generate tragedies like that little boy. And the underclass will not go away in a statist culture, either because there a great many people benefiting from institutions that depend in some sense on the continued existence of the underclass (as my darker article suggests), or because the welfare state doesn't have a clue how to fix it (per my hopeful article.)

First up is the hopeful one. As you read it, try to not quibble with the details, and try to expand your imagination to take in the "second order" and "third order" changes it would generate. It is a radically different model for how to deal with complex human needs in a modern society, so do not simply picture this alternative superimposed on top of the current society. As you read it ask yourself this question: Is a perennial underclass more or less likely to exist under the proposed system than under the current one? Keep in mind my assertion that it was being a member of an underclass household that killed that little boy.

The second article describes the pathologies of the “corporatist state” that so many here are so eager to defend. It's about Britain, which is a bit further down the road to ruin apparently, but this country is following in its tracks.

Some will read that second article and say some version of communism is the answer. My response is that communism destroys wealth creating institutions, and wealthy societies are able to do more good things than poor ones. That debate is beyond this discussion, though.

 

[Roxanne Appleby]

A Plan to Replace the Welfare State
The government should give every American $10,000--and nothing more.
http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110008142

BY CHARLES MURRAY
Sunday, March 26, 2006 12:01 a.m. EST
This much is certain: The welfare state as we know it cannot survive. No serious student of entitlements thinks that we can let federal spending on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid rise from its current 9% of gross domestic product to the 28% of GDP that it will consume in 2050 if past growth rates continue. The problems facing transfer programs for the poor are less dramatic but, in the long term, no less daunting; the falling value of a strong back and the rising value of brains will eventually create a class society making a mockery of America's ideals unless we come up with something more creative than anything that the current welfare system has to offer.

So major change is inevitable--and Congress seems utterly unwilling to face up to it. Witness the Social Security debate of last year, a case study in political timidity. Like it or not, we have several years to think before Congress can no longer postpone action. Let's use it to start thinking outside the narrow proposals for benefit cuts and tax increases that will be Congress's path of least resistance.


The place to start is a blindingly obvious economic reality that no one seems to notice: This country is awash in money. America is so wealthy that enabling everyone to have a decent standard of living is easy. We cannot do it by fiddling with the entitlement and welfare systems--they constitute a Gordian Knot that cannot be untied. But we can cut the knot. We can scrap the structure of the welfare state.

Instead of sending taxes to Washington, straining them through bureaucracies and converting what remains into a muddle of services, subsidies, in-kind support and cash hedged with restrictions and exceptions, just collect the taxes, divide them up, and send the money back in cash grants to all American adults. Make the grant large enough so that the poor won't be poor, everyone will have enough for a comfortable retirement, and everyone will be able to afford health care. We're rich enough to do it.

Consider retirement. Let's say that we have a 21-year-old man before us who, for whatever reasons, will be unable to accumulate his own retirement fund. We accumulate it for him through a yearly contribution for 45 years until he retires at age 66. We can afford to contribute $2,000 a year and invest it in an index-based stock fund. What is the least he can expect to have when he retires? We are ridiculously conservative, so we first identify the worst compound average growth rate, using constant dollars, for any 45-year period in the history of the stock market (4.3% from 1887-1932). We then assume our 21-year-old will be the unluckiest investor in American history and get just a 4.0% average return. At the end of the 45-year period, he will have about $253,000, with which he could purchase an annuity worth about $20,500 a year.

That's with just a $2,000 annual contribution, equivalent to the Social Security taxes the government gets for a person making only $16,129 a year. The government gets more than twice that amount from someone earning the median income, and more than five times that amount from the millions of people who pay the maximum FICA tax. Giving everyone access to a comfortable retirement income is easy for a country as rich as the U.S.--if we don't insist on doing it through the structure of the welfare state.

Health care is more complicated in its details, but not in its logic. We do not wait until our 21-year-old is 65 and then start paying for his health care. Instead, we go to a health insurance company and tell it that we're prepared to start paying a constant premium now for the rest of the 21-year-old's life. Given that kind of offer, the health insurance company can sell us a health care policy that covers the essentials for somewhere around $3,000. It can be so inexpensive for the same reason that life insurance companies can sell generous life insurance cheaply if people buy it when they're young--the insurance company makes a lot of money from the annual payments before eventually having to write the big benefit checks. Providing access to basic medical care for everyone is easy for a country as rich as the U.S.--if we don't insist on doing it through the structure of the welfare state.

There are many ways of turning these economic potentials into a working system. The one I have devised--I call it simply "the Plan" for want of a catchier label--makes a $10,000 annual grant to all American citizens who are not incarcerated, beginning at age 21, of which $3,000 a year must be used for health care. Everyone gets a monthly check, deposited electronically to a bank account. If we implemented the Plan tomorrow, it would cost about $355 billion more than the current system. The projected costs of the Plan cross the projected costs of the current system in 2011. By 2020, the Plan would cost about half a trillion dollars less per year than conservative projections of the cost of the current system. By 2028, that difference would be a trillion dollars per year.

Many questions must be asked of a system that substitutes a direct cash grant for the current welfare state. Work disincentives, the comparative risks of market-based solutions versus government guarantees, transition costs, tradeoffs in health coverage, implications for the tax system, and effects on people too young to qualify for the grant all require attention in deciding whether the Plan is feasible and desirable. I think all of the questions have answers, but they are not one-liners; I lay them out in my book.

For now, let me turn to a larger question: Assuming that the technical questions have answers, do we want a system in which the government divests itself of responsibility for the human needs that gave rise to the welfare state in the first place? I think the reasons for answering "yes" go far beyond the Plan's effects on poverty, retirement and health care. Those issues affect comparatively small minorities of the population. The more profound problem facing the world's most advanced societies is how their peoples are to live meaningful lives in an age of plenty and security.

Throughout history until a few decades ago, the meaning of life for almost everyone was linked to the challenge of simple survival. Staying alive required being a contributing part of a community. Staying alive required forming a family and having children to care for you in your old age. The knowledge that sudden death could happen at any moment required attention to spiritual issues. Doing all those things provided deep satisfactions that went beyond survival.

Life in an age of plenty and security requires none of those things. For the great majority of people living in advanced societies, it is easily possible to go through life accompanied by social companions and serial sex partners, having a good time, and dying in old age with no reason to think that one has done anything significant.

If you believe that's all there is--that the purpose of life is to while away the time as pleasantly as possible--then it is reasonable to think that the purpose of government should be to enable people to do so with as little effort as possible. But if you agree with me that to live a human life can have transcendental meaning, then we need to think about how human existence acquires weight and consequence.

For many readers of The Wall Street Journal, the focus of that search for meaning is bound up with vocation--for some, the quest to be rich and famous; for others, the quest to excel in a vocation one loves. But it is an option open to only to a lucky minority. For most people--including many older people who in their youths focused on vocation--life acquires meaning through the stuff of life: the elemental events associated with birth, death, growing up, raising children, paying the rent, dealing with adversity, comforting the bereaved, celebrating success, applauding the good and condemning the bad; coping with life as it exists around us in all its richness. The chief defect of the welfare state from this perspective is not that it is ineffectual in making good on its promises (though it is), nor even that it often exacerbates the very problems it is supposed to solve (though it does). The welfare state is pernicious ultimately because it drains too much of the life from life.


The Plan returns the stuff of life to all of us in many ways, but chiefly through its effects on the core institutions of family and community. One key to thinking about how the Plan does so is the universality of the grant. What matters is not just that a lone individual has $10,000 a year, but that everyone has $10,000 a year and everyone knows that everyone else has that resource. Strategies that are not open to an individual are open to a couple; strategies that are not open to a couple are open to an extended family or, for that matter, to half a dozen friends who pool resources; strategies not open to a small group are open to a neighborhood. The aggregate shift in resources from government to people under the Plan is massive, and possibilities for dealing with human needs through family and community are multiplied exponentially.

The Plan confers personal accountability whether the recipient wants it or not, producing cascading secondary and tertiary effects. A person who asks for help because he has frittered away his monthly check will find people and organizations who will help (America has a history of producing such people and organizations in abundance), but that help can come with expectations and demands that are hard to make of a person who has no income stream. Or contemplate the effects of a known income stream on the young man who impregnates his girlfriend. The first-order effect is that he cannot evade child support--the judge knows where his bank account is. The second-order effect is to create expectations that formerly didn't exist. I call it the Doolittle Effect, after Alfred Doolittle in "My Fair Lady." Recall why he had to get to the church on time.

The Plan confers responsibility for dealing with human needs on all of us, whether we want it or not. Some will see this as a step backward, thinking that it is better to pay one's taxes, give responsibility to the government and be done with it. I think an alternative outlook is wiser: The Plan does not require us all to become part-time social workers. The nation can afford lots of free riders. But Aristotle was right. Virtue is a habit. Virtue does not flourish in the next generation because we tell our children to be honest, compassionate and generous in the abstract. It flourishes because our children practice honesty, compassion and generosity in the same way that they practice a musical instrument or a sport. That happens best when children grow up in a society in which human needs are not consigned to bureaucracies downtown but are part of life around us, met by people around us.


Simply put, the Plan gives us back the action. Institutions and individuals alike thrive to the extent that they have important jobs to do and know that the responsibility to do them is on their heads. For decades, the welfare state has said to us, "We'll take care of that." As a result, we have watched some of our sources of life's most important satisfactions lose vitality. At the same time, we have learned how incompetent--how helpless--government is when "taking care of that" means dealing with complex human needs. The solution is not to tinker with the welfare state. The solution is to put responsibility for our lives back in our hands--ours as individuals, ours as families, and ours as communities.

Mr. Murray, W.H. Brady Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, is the author of "In Our Hands: A Plan to Replace the Welfare State," published this week by AEI Press.


Note - the $10,000 stipends would phase out above $50,000 in income, but not the $3,000 health insurance stipend.

 

[Roxanne Appleby]

City Journal - Winter 2007

How Not to Do It: Nothing works in the omnicompetent state.
Theodore Dalrymple

Last week, the British government announced—because the opposition in Parliament forced it to announce—that 70 prisoners, including three murderers and an unspecified number of burglars, drug dealers, and holders of false passports, had escaped from a single minimum-security prison this year alone. Twenty-eight of them were still at large.

That so many of them absconded suggested that they were not quite the reformed characters that justified lower levels of security in the first place; but as usual in Britain, temporary embarrassment soon subsides into deep amnesia. The fact is that the whole episode is precisely what we have come to expect of our public administration and was nothing out of the ordinary.

In the same week, my former colleagues, senior doctors in the hospital that I worked in until my recent retirement, received a leaflet with their monthly pay stubs. It offered them, along with all other employees, literacy training: a little late in their careers as doctors, one might have thought.

The senior doctors could take up to 30 hours of free courses to improve their literacy and numeracy skills, all in working time, of course. In these courses, they could learn to spell at least some words, to punctuate, to add and do fractions, and to read a graph.

“Do you have a SPIKEY [sic] profile?” asked the leaflet, and went on to explain: “A spikey profile is when a person is good at literacy but not at mathematics or visa [sic] versa.” The reader could address himself to one of no fewer than four members of the hospital staff who were “contact persons” for the courses, among them the Vocational Training Coordinator and the Non-Vocational Training Coordinator. In case none was available to answer the telephone or reply to e-mails, the reader could contact one of three central government agencies that deal with the problem of illiterate and innumerate employees.

Here, truly, was a case of the lunatics taking over the asylum; but there is more to the ignorance and incompetence pervading the leaflet than meets the eye. Such ignorance and incompetence are now so systematic and widespread in the British public service that if they are not the result of deliberate policy, they might as well be. In fact, there is now a profoundly catalytic relationship between the intellectual, moral, and economic corruption of the British public service and the degeneration of the national character. Which among all the various factors came first and is therefore ultimately causative is not easy to say; as usual, I suspect that intellectual error is at the root of most evil. But why such error should have found so ready an acceptance raises the specter of an infinite regress of explanation, which perhaps we can avoid only by invoking a dialectical approach.

Three new books give us an insight into the nature of the corruption that has sprung from the ever-wider extension of self-arrogated government responsibility in Britain, and they shed light as well on the effect that government expansion has upon the population. By the time you have finished reading them, you are unsure as to whether Gogol, Kafka, or Orwell offers the best insight into contemporary British reality. Gogol captures the absurdity all right, and Kafka the anxiety caused by an awareness of sinister but unidentifiable forces behind what is happening; but you also need Orwell to appreciate, and sometimes even to admire, the brazenness with which officialdom twists language to mean the opposite of what it would once ordinarily have meant.

Two of the books are by men who work in the front line of the public service, one in law enforcement and the other in education. Like me, they write pseudonymously. By describing their day-to-day routine, Police Constable David Copperfield and teacher Frank Chalk show how the British state now works, or rather operates, with devastating effect on the British character.

Copperfield, whose website is so annoying to politicians in power that they feel obliged to denigrate it in Parliament, and whose book is titled Wasting Police Time, is an ordinary constable in an ordinary British town. As he makes clear in his book, very little of his time at work is spent in activity that could deter crime, discover those who commit it, or bring them to justice. His induction into the culture of politically correct bureaucratic incompetence was immediate on joining up: he had naively supposed that the main purpose of his job was the protection of the public by the suppression of malefaction, instead of which he discovered that it was to “set about changing the racist, homophobic and male-dominated world in which we lived.” The first three days of his training were about prejudice and discrimination—in short, “diversity training.” There never was to be any training in the mere investigation of crimes, a minor and secondary part of modern police work in Britain.

The mandated, politically inspired obsession with racism is on view in the crawlingly embarrassing and condescending speech that the deputy chief constable (deputy police chief) of North Wales, Clive Wolfendale, gave to the inaugural meeting of the North Wales Black Police Association. He decided, Copperfield reports, to speak to the black officers in rap verse, which is about as tactful as addressing Nelson Mandela in pidgin. Here is an extract from Wolfendale’s speech:

Put away your cameras and your notepads for a spell.
I got a story that I really need to tell.
Bein’ in the dibble [police] is no cakewalk when you’re black.
If you don’t get fitted, then you’ll prob’ly get the sack.
You’re better chillin’ lie down and just be passive.
No place for us just yet in the Colwyn Bay Massive [police force].
That must have encouraged the black officers no end: if the (white) deputy chief constable, in his maladroit attempt to demonstrate sympathy with them, had called them a bunch of jungle bunnies, he could hardly have made his feelings clearer. His speech reveals what I have long suspected: that antiracism is the new racism.

It is also, and simultaneously, a job opportunity and work-avoidance scheme. Copperfield recounts how, in 1999, a police officer said to a black motorist, who did not answer a question, “Okay, so you’re deaf as well as black.” The report of the official inquiry into the subsequent complaint had 62 pages of attachments, 20 pages of witness statements, and 172 pages of interview transcripts. Legal and disciplinary proceedings took 19 months to complete.

Meanwhile, as the police devote vast energies (and expenditures) to such incidents, crimes such as street robbery and assault continue their inexorable rise and turn much of the country into a no-go area for all but the drunk or the violently inclined.

Copperfield, who joined the police full of idealism, soon notices (as how could he not?) that the completion of bureaucratic procedure is now more important to the police than anything else. All is in order if the forms are filled in correctly. A single arrest takes up to six hours to process, so many and various are the forms. He notices that there are more nonpolice employed in his police station than uniformed officers; and of the latter, the majority are deskbound. The station parking lot is full, 9 to 5, Monday through Friday, but the whole town has only three or four officers to patrol the streets—in cars, of course, not on foot.

The author describes the intellectual and moral corruption that all this bureaucracy brings in its wake. Take, for example, the so-called Administrative Detection, which allows the police and their political masters to mislead the public about the seriousness and efficiency with which the authorities tackle criminality. It works something like this: someone calls the police about a trifling dispute—one neighbor accuses the other of threatening behavior, say, and the accused then in turn accuses the accuser. The cops record the two complaints as crimes and take statements from every possible witness. This, of course, can take a very long time, because by the time cops arrive, the witnesses will probably have dispersed. They have to be traced and contacted, and—because the police are now so touchingly-feelingly sensitive to the wishes of the public—mutually convenient times have to be arranged for the taking of statements.

When finally the police have gathered all the information, they write it up; but of course, no prosecution follows, because by then the complainants have withdrawn their complaint, and in any case the prosecuting authorities would regard the whole business as too trivial to be worth a trial. But the two crimes go into the records as having been solved. And since the politicians in charge judge police performance by the proportion of crimes the force solves, cops do not devote attention to most real crimes, in which detection is difficult and very uncertain of success.

The uselessness of a police force that once excited the admiration of the world is now taken for granted by every Briton who calls the police only to obtain a crime number for insurance purposes, not in the expectation or even hope of any effort at detection. This is not because the individual policeman is lazy, ill-intentioned, corrupt, or stupid, though in the present system he might just as well be: for the system in which he works imposes upon him all the effects (or defects) of precisely those qualities. P.C. Copperfield is clearly a man who wants to do a good job, like most of the policemen I have met, but the system actively and deliberately prevents him from doing so.

I happened, while waiting to interview a man in prison, to be reading Copperfield’s book, and two plainclothes policemen in the waiting room saw it. They had read the work, and I asked them whether what Copperfield wrote was true. “Every word,” they replied.

Frank Chalk’s book, It’s Your Time You’re Wasting, tells essentially the same story, this time with regard to education. It surely requires some explanation that, in a country that expends $5,200 a year for 11 years on each child’s education, a fifth of children leave school virtually unable to read or write, let alone do simple arithmetic. It takes considerable organization to achieve so little, especially when the means by which practically all children can be taught to read to a high standard are perfectly well-known. A small local educational authority in Scotland, for example, West Dumbarton, has virtually eliminated illiteracy in children, despite the fact that its population is among the poorest in Scotland, by using simple teaching methods and at an additional cost of precisely $25 per pupil.

The intellectual corruption of the English education system is near complete (the Scottish system is rather better). For example, there is a government inspectorate of schools, charged with the maintenance of standards. However, it gives each school it visits several weeks’ warning of an impending inspection, ample time for even the dullest-witted school administrators to construct a Potemkin village. And then it criticizes all the wrong things: the inspectors criticized Frank Chalk, for example, for having imposed discipline upon his class and thereby having impeded the spontaneity and creativity of the children—which, in the circumstances of the slum school in which he teaches, they principally express in vandalism. The school inspectorate therefore appears to believe in the truth of the anarchist Bakunin’s dictum—that the destructive urge is also creative.

As an epigraph to his book, Chalk quotes the British deputy prime minister, John Prescott. In that great man’s immortal words, which tell you everything about the caliber of the British government that you really need to know, “If you set up a school and it becomes a good school, the great danger is that everyone wants to go there.” And that would never do.

In the looking-glass world of modern British public administration, nothing succeeds like failure, because failure provides work for yet more functionaries and confers an ever more providential role upon the government. A child who does not learn to read properly often behaves badly in school and thus becomes the subject (or is it object?) of inquiries by educational psychologists and social workers. As Chalk describes, they always find that the child in question lacks self-esteem and therefore should be allowed to attend only those classes that he feels he can cope with. The so-called Senior Management Team in the school—teachers who have retired into a largely administrative role—deals with all disciplinary problems by means of appeasement, for lack of any other permissible method available to them.

A perverse ideology reigns, in which truth and probity play no part. When marking the children’s work, Chalk is expected to make only favorable comments, designed to boost egos rather than to improve performance. Public examinations are no longer intended to test educational attainment against an invariant standard but to provide the government with statistics that provide evidence of ever-better results. In pursuit of such excellence, not only do examinations require ever less of the children, but so-called course work, which may actually be done by the children’s parents or even by the teachers themselves, plays an important part in the marks the children receive—and it is marked by the very teachers whose performance is judged by the marks that their pupils achieve. The result, of course, is a swamp of corruption, to wade through which teachers become utterly cynical, time-serving, and without self-respect.

A perfect emblem of the Gogolian, Kafkaesque, and Orwellian nature of the British public administration is the term “social inclusion” as applied in the educational field. Schools may no longer exclude disruptive children—that would be the very opposite of social inclusion—so a handful of such children may render quite pointless hundreds or even thousands of hours of schooling for scores or even hundreds of their peers who, as a result, are less likely to succeed in life. Teachers such as Chalk are forced to teach mixed-ability classes, which can include the mentally handicapped (their special schools having been closed in the name of social inclusion). The most intelligent children in the class fidget with boredom while the teacher persistently struggles to instill understanding in the minds of the least intelligent children of what the intelligent pupils long ago grasped. The intelligent are not taught what they could learn, while the unintelligent are taught what they cannot learn. The result is chaos, resentment, disaffection, and despair all round.

Britain now has more educational bureaucrats than teachers, as well as more health-service administrators than hospital beds. No self-evident or entirely predictable failure, no catastrophe they have brought about at the behest of their political masters, ever affects their careers, in part because they move from post to post so quickly that none of them ever gets held responsible for anything. The public hospital in which my wife worked as a doctor before her recent retirement built a $28 million extension, but what had been imperatively necessary for the health of the town’s population six years ago became equally superfluous four years later and had to be closed down with great urgency, though with the public assurances of the bureaucrats then in charge that they were “passionately” committed to the townspeople’s welfare. No one, of course, was ever held responsible for this expensive fiasco, which fully partook of the absurdity Gogol portrays, the menace Kafka evokes (employees were, on the whole, too frightened for their careers to speak out), and the mendacity Orwell dramatizes.

Insight into why expensive failure is so vitally necessary to the British government—or indeed, to any government once it arrogates responsibility for almost everything, from the national diet to the way people think—glimmers out from management consultant David Craig’s recent book, Plundering the Public Sector. Craig catalogs what at first sight seems the almost incredible incompetence of the British government in its efforts to “modernize” the public administration. For example, not a single large-scale information technology project instituted by the government has worked. The National Health Service has spent $60 billion on a unified information technology system, no part of which actually functions. Projects routinely get canceled after $400– $500 million has been spent on them. Modernization in Britain’s public sector means delay and inefficiency procured at colossal expense.

How is this to be explained? I learned a very good lesson when, 20 years ago, I worked in Tanzania. This well-endowed and beautiful country was broken-down and economically destitute to a shocking degree. A shard of mirror was a treasured possession; a day’s wages bought a man one egg on the open market. It was quicker to go to Europe than to telephone it. Nothing, not even the most basic commodity such as soap or salt, was available to most of the population.

At first I considered that the president, Julius Nyerere, who was so revered in “progressive” circles as being halfway between Jesus Christ and Mao Tse Tung, was a total incompetent. How could he reconcile the state of the country with his rhetoric of economic development and prosperity for everyone? Had he no eyes to see, no ears to hear?

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, once one abandons the preposterous premise that he was trying to achieve what he said he was trying to achieve. As a means of remaining in power, what method could be better than to have an all-powerful single political party distribute economic favors in conditions of general shortage? That explained how, and why, in a country of the involuntarily slender, the party officials were fat. This was not incompetence; it was competence of a very high order. Unfortunately, it was very bad for the population as a whole.

The scheme in Britain is, of course, rather different. (It is not necessary to believe that such schemes have been consciously elaborated, incidentally; rather, they are inherent in the statism that comes naturally to so many politicians because of their self-importance.) The hoops that bind the government to the consultants who advise it in its perennially failing schemes of modernization are those of gold. As Craig demonstrates (though without understanding all the implications), the consultants need failure in Britain to perpetuate the contracts that allow them to charge so outrageously and virtually ad libitum (Craig suggests that $140 billion has disappeared so far, with no end in sight); and, in turn, the government benefits from having this rich but utterly dependent clientele.

The beauty of the system is that dependence on expensive failure reaches quite low levels of the administration: for example, all those “civilians” (as nonpolice workers for the police are called) in P.C. Copperfield’s police station, as well as the educational psychologists whom Frank Chalk derides. The state has become a vast and intricate system of patronage, whose influence very few can entirely escape. It is essentially corporatist: the central government, avid for power, sets itself up as an authority on everything and claims to be omnicompetent both morally and in practice; and by means of taxation, licensing, regulation, and bureaucracy, it destroys the independence of all organizations that intervene between it and the individual citizen. If it can draw enough citizens into dependence on it, the central government can remain in power, if not forever, then for a very long time, at least until a crisis or cataclysm forces change.

At the very end of the chain of patronage in the British state is the underclass, who (to change the metaphor slightly) form the scavengers or bottom-feeders of the whole corporatist ecosystem. Impoverished and degraded as they might be, they are nonetheless essential to the whole system, for their existence provides an ideological proof of the necessity of providential government in the first place, as well as justifying many employment opportunities in themselves. Both Copperfield and Chalk describe with great eloquence precisely what I have seen myself in this most wretched stratum of society: large numbers of people corrupted to the very fiber of their being by having been deprived of responsibility, purpose, and self-respect, void of hope and fear alike, living in as near to purgatory as anywhere in modern society can come.

Of course, the corporatist system, at least in its British incarnation, is a house of cards, or perhaps a better analogy would be with a pyramid scheme. Hundreds of thousands of people are employed to perform tasks that are not merely useless but actually obstructive of real work and economically counterproductive. The bureaucracy insinuates itself into the smallest cracks of daily life. Renting out a house recently, I learned from a real-estate agent that the government sends inspectors, in the guise of prospective tenants, to check that the upholstery on chairs is fire-retardant. The inspectors have no other function. The regulations shift like one of those speeded-up meteorological maps on television, creating the need for yet more inspections and inspectors. Recent new regulations for landlords exceed 1,000 pages of close print; in the meantime, Britain does not remain short of decaying housing stock, while rents are among the highest in the world.

The government has to pay for all this activity, supposedly carried out on behalf of the population, somehow. It is simultaneously committed to huge public expenditure and apparent, though not real, control of the public debt. It reconciles the irreconcilable by not including the extravagantly generous pension obligations of the public service in its debt calculations—pension obligations that, properly accounted for, now amount to nearly 56 percent of GDP. Also not included is the government’s increasing resort to private finance of government institutions, which involves huge future expenditure obligations without the capital costs having to appear in the national accounts.

In other words, the government has turned the cynical last words of an eighteenth-century absolute monarch, Louis XV, into the guiding principle of its policy: après nous, le déluge.

 

[Zeb_Carter]

Oooh, that devious Nancy Pelosi! Putting the re-elected Congressman from New Orleans on the committee that oversees much of the Katrina recovery effort! Scandalous!

I'm no fan of "Cool Cash" Jefferson, but it takes some gall for the party who put Tom DeLay up for the Ethics Committee to squeal about this. I mean, she has to put him somewhere.

How 'bout jail!

 

[MagicaPractica]

Can I just say one thing? "Absolute power corrupts absolutely." A little bit isn't much better.

 

[Zeb_Carter]

The only person who would make a good politician is the person who doesn't want to be a politician, doesn't want the power, doesn't what to be in charge, doesn't want the responsibility.

From what I see in today’s world there is no one who wouldn't abuse the power they gain by being a politician whether they be Dem or Rep or Lib or some other party we have yet heard from.

Even I who would be absolutely repulsed by the mere thought of being in charge would be corrupted by the power gained.

There isn't one of us here that wouldn't be tempted or forced by our beliefs, to push their own agenda, no matter what, even if that agenda was bad for the country or for that matter the world as a whole.