How Much Do You Want the Government to Do?

Back around 1972, I took a vacation to Asia by myself. I spent a couple of weeks in Japan, a few days in Taiwan, and a few days in Hong Kong. One day, I was walking around downtown Taipei, the capital of Taiwan, and passed by a female who was lying on a piece of cardboard on the sidewalk begging for money. To this day, she is the most pitiful human being I have ever encountered. She was the size of a small child, badly deformed, and probably unable to walk. I couldn't tell if she was an adult or child. Judging from her face, I guessed she was probably a leper. My reaction, perhaps naively, was why wouldn't the government intervene and put this poor human being in some sort of facility where she could at least be fed, cared for and made to be comfortable.

Over 35 years later, I have not changed my view.

Yet, there is a definite limit on what I think the government, especially the US Government should do to help out its citizens. There are, without doubt, people out there who are physically and/or mentally unable to care for themselves through no fault of their own. In those cases, I feel government must provide a safety net to take care of these people.

However, when it comes to others who are physically able to take care of themselves, I feel differently. I don't feel it is the business of government, through the tax-payers, to nurse everybody in our country through life. (Admittedly, there is a big gray area when children of irresponsible people are concerned.) Unfortunately, we seem to have lost sight of that in the US.

In my view, the primary role of government is to protect the country (from invasion etc)and protect the citizens from crime. Aside from that, the government must also provide an infrastructure (roads, bridges etc), hospitals and schools, the latter preferable at the local level. Also, the government, through its laws, should ensure that everyone has an equal opportunity to pursue life, liberty and happiness. It does not have the obligation to ensure equal results. In other words, the government should not try to ensure that every citizen has the same education, income and professional status. Unfortunately, individuals are different when it comes to all the factors that go into having a good and successful life. This has nothing to do with race or gender-it is an individual thing. When government engages in social engineering, the results are usually unsuccessful at least and disastrous at worst.

One example is Lyndon Johnson's so-called Great Society, which featured in the wake of the Civil Rights Era, a system of welfare for people on the lower end of the ecomonic scale. A large proportion of those receiving welfare were African-Americans. Yet, welfare, in spite of its good intentions, created an entire generation of people who became dependent on the government. As part of this government-inspired system, there were financial disincentives for 2-parent families. As is usually the case, good intentions led to unintended consequences. Since that time, we have witnessed what I consider to be the greatest disaster to befall black America-the break-up of the black family. Black illigitimacy, about 25% in the worst days of Jim Crow, has reached 70% today (to be fair, white illigitimacy has also risen, albeit not so dramatically). In my view, the lack of stable 2-parent families is the real root cause of all the problems that exist in black communities-drugs, gangs, crime, violence, lack of respect for women and what have you. Yet, we continue to delude ourselves that is all due to on-going white racism.

Another issue is when the government tries to create a solution (ie, a program) to fix every perceived problem. Not only is the government stepping beyond its true role, but it necessarily must increase its size, wealth and power in order to do so. New agencies must be formed, more laws and regulations passed, more government employees must be hired, additional bureaucracy created, and more money must be collected in the form of taxes. The result is that more and more wealth must be taken from tax-payers and more power is given to the government.

Sound familiar? Sure it does because it is happening right here in the US, especially in places like California and Massachusetts. In fact, this is the prime point of difference in the philosophies of liberals and conservatives. Liberals perceive a problem, and immediately, they want a solution. Who is best equipped to bring the solution? Government of course. So it is fair to say that liberals favor a bigger and stronger government. I have already outlined the costs of such a government above.

A prime example of a government that set out to make everyone the same was the former Soviet Union. The Russian Revolution sprang from a reaction to centuries of autocratic Czarist rule that featured many social-economic inequalities. Under Lenin, the non-Russian nationalities and Jews were given more equality. This eventually dissolved under Stalin, who favored Russification-even though he himself was a Georgian. At any rate, what resulted was a huge centralized, totalitarian state that provided little incentive for anyone to try to get ahead through their own talent and initiative. As for political and civil liberties, we all know what that was like.

Yet today, even though the Soviet system has been discredited, there are those here in the US that want to move us in that direction, at least as far as Western European-style socialism.

As someone who actually worked for the US Government for 25 years, I am of the firm opinion that government is, by its very nature, inefficient. Actually, as a DEA agent, I would maintain that federal law enforcement, at least at the working agent level, is one of the more efficient government entities. However, DEA's efficiency ended when it came to HQs in Washington. Then it became just another bureaucracy. Most other federal agents I knew said the same about their own agencies. By the way, I would still defend the need for federal law enforcement agencies due to the trans-national nature of criminal organizations that routinely cross state or international boundaries. It is essential to have an agency that can coordinate with their own offices-and have working relationships with international police agencies as well.

Notwithstanding the above exception, if government, by its very nature is inefficient, why, in a free market democracy, should we entrust it with more and more responsibility and power? For example, why should we centralize education in Washington? Why should we turn over health care to a Washington bureaucracy?

Let me expound on that a bit. As for education. At the public level, it is a mess, especially in our large cities. Not all of that is the fault of the schools since so many pupils are bringing a lot of issues with them to school. But how can it be solved-or how has it been solved by this thing we call the Department of Education? Yet, we keep hearing about the need to pour more and more money into a failed system. Do I have the answer for the failure of public schools in our major cites? No, but I refuse to believe it will be achieved by raising taxes. Places like Washington DC, LA and New York have the highest money expenditure per student in the nation-and they are all gross failures. We will never fix it by raising taxes, property taxes or otherwise, yet, that is exactly what the politicians want to do. It's like when a baseball team keeps paying a huge salary to some guy that hits .220 year after year.

In the area of health care, we have decided that we are in the midst of a health care crisis-even though we have the best health care in the world. It is estimated that we have some 40 million people without insurance. Out of that total, of course, some 12 million are illegal aliens. In addition, there is a large proportion made up of younger workers who decide at their age that they don't need health insurance and would rather have the extra money. So for their benefit, some want to scrap our whole system and turn it all over to the government-who will only screw it up for everyone. But, you say, why can't we have a system like Canada's or the UK's? Everybody is covered there, right? Yet, why do so many Canadians and Brits come to the US when they need serious medical treatment? Primarily, it is because the bureaucracy forces them to wait several months to obtain major surgery (in which time, they may die), or, in the case of Canada, a patient may have to travel across country to a place where a certain kind of surgery can be performed.

No thank you.

To me, the best solution is not to chip away at our free-market system. Like it or not, the profit motive is what makes it successful. Yes, we like to demonize our oil companies, our insurance companies and our pharmaceutical companies for raising prices without considering the cost of oil exploration or the influence of world demand, or the cost of research, development and approval of new drugs. Let's just have the government impose price controls and take over the whole operation-as if that will solve all our problems. It won't. It will just screw it up.

Now let me turn to the latest "crisis", the one that has the red phone ringing in the White House at 3 am: The housing and foreclosure crisis. So now, we want the government and the tax-payer to come to the rescue of people who took out unwise loans and bought homes that were beyond their financial means. In other words, we want to protect people from the consequences of their unwise decisions. What's next? Will we protect gamblers who go to Las Vegas and lose all their money?

Now, I am not arguing that businesses who violate the law or engage in shady practices should be protected. If a lending company engages in deceptive practices, or a company like Enron breaks the law-then certainly there should be laws to deal with that and there are. However, people who borrow money or take out a mortgage need to act responsibly and read the fine print. I have bought three homes in my life time. I never bought a home I couldn't afford, and I always knew what the terms were. Bottom line? It is not the business of the government-using tax-payer money-to protect individuals from their own bad decisions. In this vein, I would also argue against government bailing out failed companies and corporations from their bad business practices-even if jobs are lost from a company's bankruptcy. The Chrysler bailout was a prime example.

Finally, would someone please explain to me why the government has to fund entities like the National Endowment for the Arts, National Public Radio and Public Broadcasting? We are surrounded by art, radio and TV and can choose what we like. Why does the tax-payer have to support the above? Can they not survive on their own-and if they don't, so what? That is the free marketplace.

It is tempting to insert a political argument into all this since the Democratic Party and its two remaining presidential candidates all want to impose more government involvement on the rest of us. Yet, the performance of the Republicans in recent years has been less than stellar. Mainly, they have gone to Washington and become part of the problem as well. They have deserted their roots-and have paid the price at the polls. In fact, very few of us would look at this government we have now and try to argue that it is operating well. Then why should we want to give it more power and responsibility in solving every perceived problem? Maybe, just maybe, we should look to ourselves to solve our own problems.

In spite of our shortcomings, there is no other country on earth that provides its citizens with the opportunity to rise above the circumstances of their birth and become successful through their own hard work, initiative and performance. Everyone is free to succeed-or fail on their own. We should not be demanding that government take us by the hand and lead the way to success, rather we should be demanding that it get out of our way. The more we want our government to be our servants, the more we will discover that they have become our masters.