The author I’m about to share is right. Instead of outsourcing more and more of our lives to the government, the evidence tells us it should be less because Washington can’t solve any problem.
And it matters, just ask Mr. Obama.
The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works — whether it helps families find jobs at a decent wage, care they can afford, a retirement that is dignified.”
– President Barack Obama, Inauguration, 1/20/09
It doesn’t work, so when I saw this article a few days ago, I started to mull over how to comment on it to add value.
The answer like some others from time to time Iis that I can’t. I really can’t do much more to add value but I agree with the premise. The government does too much and we MUST hold it to more account; to do fewer things and do those fewer things FAR better than they do now.
Once again, I think this is where many of us are today – via “Dense Pack.” We see our government being changed, we see our Society changed, values changed, traditions nullified. Our History is being changed in front of us, and our language is being weaponized against us.
This piece speaks to the Government side and how Progressives perceive themselves but their policy and program results belie their words.
Emphasis mine which is about the best I can do:
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Unintelligent Government Design: Why Washington Can’t Solve America’s Problems (by Gary M. Galles, Professor of Economics at Pepperdine University)
Remember when intelligent design was a red-hot controversy? A centerpiece of criticism was that it was not provable. In the recent supercharged expansion of government spending and control over its citizens, I have been struck by the fact that government design frequently fails the same intelligence test, yet such unproven faith — or more accurately, such provably false faith — in government as the go-to problem solver seems impervious to that reality.
Evidence can be found in the overwhelming extent to which government assails us rather than alleviates what ails us, despite constant reassurances that we should follow their directions because they follow “science” that isn’t there, in policies that illustrate the Law of Unintended Consequences rather than achieving stated goals, in spending trillions lavishly as if they were free rather than forcibly extracted from future generations, and in distorting language beyond recognition in order to justify the unjustified, as when everything is redefined as “infrastructure.”
So why don’t we more aggressively question whether government is an intelligent-enough designer to reduce rather than exacerbate our problems?
Is it proven that government, whose only superior ability over its citizens is in coercing others, advances Americans’ life, liberty, or happiness by its ubiquitous intrusion our lives? Our founders certainly did not believe so.
The Declaration of Independence and Constitution clearly reflect the opposite conclusion. None of the principles they articulated would lead us to believe that government over-riding of ever-more of our choices will give us better results. Yet our deviations from those principles only increase with government’s size.
Can the constant promisers of utopian results produce any credible evidence that government policies and programs work so well, with each intricate part fitting together so seamlessly, that we should credit their designers with sufficient intelligence to trust still more decisions to them? And if not, why should we believe in government “doing something” about every perceived problem, real or imaginary?
Why would we think that moving decisions to government reflects anything other than unintelligent design? A government plan cannot replicate the market system’s integration and productive use of the vastly different and overlapping knowledge of each of its participants, coordinated without central planners.
And government planners do not know us as well or care as much about us than we do. Through markets, people can make use of the highly varied, dispersed information each has, without needing to precisely understand and communicate all the important “who, what, when, where, why and how” information to government bureaucrats, trusting them to use it to advance our well-being. Consequently, moving more decisions to government throws away reams of valuable, detailed information that millions of individuals know, leading to less-intelligent results.
This is illustrated at innumerable regulatory hearings demonstrating that regulators don’t know enough about what they are regulating for their proposals to work as planned. And the “successes” government advocates point to that are really the result of involuntary “contributions” coerced from others, especially later generations (such as Social Security and Medicare, which are far from sustainable anyway) offer no honest support, either.
In contrast to government decision-making, where all the knowledge must first be centralized, unavoidably destroying a great deal of valuable intelligence (sources of wealth creation) in the process, all those in markets need in order to better perform the tasks that overwhelm governments is for people’s rights to be defended, including their freedom to offer to buy or sell in their varying circumstances. The results exceed those of government dictation premised on unavoidably inadequate and often incorrect information.
When you spend your own money, you do not delegate crucial decisions to designers with extensive, consistent records of failure. They are not intelligent enough in the relevant ways to let them decide for you.
Saying we need the government to do more, despite just such a record, which gets repeated every day, is no more sensible. Not only is intelligent government design not established, unintelligent government design is frequently demonstrated, making faith in those designers’ coercive solutions unjustified.
(H/T Issues & Insights)
