Liberals hate to have the word "accountability" applied to them as well as the results of their policies. After all, if a cost / benefits and results oriented review of programs paid by taxpayer dollars were done on a regular basis, I bet many would be discontinued in a flash.
Sometimes, it isn’t about the money – it’s about the signal government gives to others? An example? Here’s one sent to the most vulnerable amongst us – school kids. I just saw a bit on Fox News where a Superintendent Bernard Taylor in Grand Rapids no longer wants to hold his students accountable for flunking (more here).
My thought? This is just another attempt of a liberal society to mitigate bad decisions. While nobody like to wish ill (for the most part) on others, there are times when people have to fail in order to learn to do better. In fact, many of our real successful people (e.g., Rush Limbaugh, Henry Ford, Abraham Lincoln) failed multiple times before obtaining success. Eliminating that outcome can only cause society to fail later on.
And now, we have some experimental evidence that failure, and holding freeloaders accountable for their failure, works to self-correct that problem:
The threat of punishment actually does stamp out freeloaders, tending to transform them into rule-following members of a society, a new study suggests.
The research results show how established norms and rules in a society could keep freeloaders in check and increase pro-social behavior, such as helping others or sharing with them rather than looking out for number one.
In the past, studies have found that while punishing freeloaders can increase their cooperation with others, the punishment itself was too costly and in the end, punishment wouldn’t be worth it. These past studies were based on short-term effects, however.
The new study shows that over the long term, punishment gets ingrained in people’s psyches in a way that causes them to fear getting into trouble. This fear can keep otherwise freeloaders, who would normally act as sponges to soak up the generosity of others without having to contribute any time or money, on the straight-and-narrow.
The research will be published in the Dec. 5 issue of the journal Science.
Liberals tend to blame everything under the sun for the sins of transgressors (hey, they’ll love that bit too!). Society is at fault, poverty is the problem, bad education, horrible parents, uncaring this, that, and the other thing – everything other than the problem person. Everyone and everything is held accountable except for the person who has failed.
It’s nice to see, even in a limited experiment, that what seems to be common sense, really is commonsensical.
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