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.

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Chappies

“But I saw a man yesterday who knows a fellow who had it from a chappie that said that Urquhart had been dipping himself a bit recklessly off the deep end.” —Freddy Arbuthnot
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison

Hugo on Genius

“Tear down theory, poetic systems... No more rules, no more models... Genius conjures up rather than learns... ” —Victor Hugo
César Graña, Bohemian versus Bourgeois

Education

“We have met with families in which for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school.”
E. G. West, Education and the State

Faith & Purpose

“When we began first to preach these things, the people appeared as awakened from the sleep of ages—they seemed to see for the first time that they were responsible beings...”
Finke, Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990

Conversion

“When we received Christ,” Phil added, “all of a sudden we now had a rule book to go by, and when we had problems the preacher was right there to give us the answers.”
James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh

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

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

China and Christianity

At first, we thought [the power of the West] was because you had more powerful guns than we had. Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. Next we focused on your economic system. But in the past twenty years, we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity.
David Aikman, Jesus in Beijing

Religion, Property, and Family

But the only religions that have survived are those which support property and the family. Thus the outlook for communism, which is both anti-property and anti-family, (and also anti-religion), is not promising.
F.A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit

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

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

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