Government is Just a Hammer
Mar. 22nd, 2003 12:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rowynI think the thing that I disliked the most about the game NationStates was its implicit assumption that government was the controlling force to society. That is to say, everything that happens in a society: the economy, the divorce rate, the family structure, technological achievements, etc., was the direct result of government policies. There is an assumption that if the government doesn't do something, nothing will happen. If the government doesn't save the rainforest, then it will inevitably be cut down. If the government doesn't outlaw public indecency, everyone will walk the streets naked. If the government doesn't provide social security, then all elderly people will go homeless.
I think it's this fundamental assumption that leads people to think of Libertarians as hard-hearted conservatives indifferent to human suffering. You look at someone who says "we should do away with food stamps" and it's hard not to think "Don't you care?"
Of course I care. Of course I think people should help one another. Of course I believe in charity, in compassion, in decency.
What I don't believe is that the State is any good at charity or compassion. The State is good -- really good -- at just one thing: the use of force. By golly, if you need guns or jails or manpower to kick people around, the State is the place to go. It can bully, harass, and coerce like nobody's business.
And that's a good thing. There will always be powers in the world that will use force against you, and force will always be necessary to defend you from it. The State, ideally, is that good guy using its considerable force in defense of its people.
But force is not the solution to every problem -- at the very least, not the best solution to every problem. When the State tries to do other things, that don't really involve the use of force, it tends to botch them up. It has unintended consequences. It's so big and impersonal that it lends itself to corruption and abuse.
It's not that I'm a pessimist and think people are so pathetic they don't deserve help and should be left to die if they can't take care of themselves. It's that I'm a hopeless optimist, and I think that smaller organizations will step in to fill the void, and to do it better, if the State stops trying.
The State is a hammer. It's a big hammer. It's a really good hammer. But not every problem in the world is a nail.
I think it's this fundamental assumption that leads people to think of Libertarians as hard-hearted conservatives indifferent to human suffering. You look at someone who says "we should do away with food stamps" and it's hard not to think "Don't you care?"
Of course I care. Of course I think people should help one another. Of course I believe in charity, in compassion, in decency.
What I don't believe is that the State is any good at charity or compassion. The State is good -- really good -- at just one thing: the use of force. By golly, if you need guns or jails or manpower to kick people around, the State is the place to go. It can bully, harass, and coerce like nobody's business.
And that's a good thing. There will always be powers in the world that will use force against you, and force will always be necessary to defend you from it. The State, ideally, is that good guy using its considerable force in defense of its people.
But force is not the solution to every problem -- at the very least, not the best solution to every problem. When the State tries to do other things, that don't really involve the use of force, it tends to botch them up. It has unintended consequences. It's so big and impersonal that it lends itself to corruption and abuse.
It's not that I'm a pessimist and think people are so pathetic they don't deserve help and should be left to die if they can't take care of themselves. It's that I'm a hopeless optimist, and I think that smaller organizations will step in to fill the void, and to do it better, if the State stops trying.
The State is a hammer. It's a big hammer. It's a really good hammer. But not every problem in the world is a nail.
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I agree, I think.
I'm curious to see what they guy's book is like (since the game is supposedly modeled after it, or at least meant to advertise it.) Maybe I'll check it out if it shows up at the library.
But yeah, it bugs me that it asks me about religious matters, and general public policy. I'm thinking, "What, can't people figure these things out on their own?"
At first I felt like everyone in my nation was an extremist, but then I guess it was parodying the notion that those are the most vocal people in a given population.
I've come to the conclusion that it's not so much a game as it is an indirect soapbox. But then, I've only been playing it for a couple weeks, so...
It seems that dismissing issues tends to be the way to go, most of the time. And when I do make a decision, after a while it disappears and it's as if it never happened (which is fine if I chose badly, but otherwise I find it annoying.)
Okay, enough ranting in your comment area. (I was actually going to write about this in my journal, but your entry triggered it early for me. Thanks a lot!) ';P
Re: I agree, I think.
Date: 2003-03-22 02:16 pm (UTC)I gave up on the game several weeks ago, after I'd seen essentially all the issues. I joined the UN to see if that would spark my enthusiasm to continue playing, but it didn't. (I never even voted on a UN issue.)
Not just a hammer....but mostly, yes.
Date: 2003-03-23 05:26 am (UTC)The more I think about this general area, the more I see two types of people becoming prominent: the ones who insist that the world will be just fine, if only there are enough rules, and we're made to follow them. And the ones who have lost faith in government to protect their rights, and are retreating into cultural balkanization. Be it gays, women, blacks, natives, Latter Day Saints, etc. And the main reason these folks are getting to be a real threat to our liberty (the control freaks) and civil society (the secessional factions)is because both of them have become very good at coopting and manipulating government's forcefulness.
Certainly, I'm no fan of government myself, as you well know.
However, government has valuable function of determining what consensus is and (when the system works properly) -restraining- the use of force. That is, not only do they NOT use force, but they create an environment where no else can, either. For example, in the early modern period, Elizabethan england was heir to tremendous factional strife between Catholics, Anglicans, and Puritans. Yet somehow the government realized after three generations of trying to fight for supremacy...that the best answer would be to try to lay down arms between the factions. Yes, undeniably, Anglicans enjoyed political and economic preference. But in this mileu it would have been unthinkable not to be preferential to your own faith.
But unlike France or Spain, they managed to stop the tempting spoils-politics by being generous in victory rather than paranoid. Now, you might ask why this makes government a nicer sort of thing. The point is that sadly, while we talk in theory about "the tyranny of the majority" the point is that the majority expects to get what it wants. But government, in a well run society, provides just enough of a break that they don't make the rest of society losers as that majority prevails. And yet the government is still responsive enough to the statistical consensus that people feel satisfied with their representation. There are many, many social conflicts that could fester without this "societal demilitarization"...the government declares who wins what in the social conflict....and keeps the peace.
This is, I admit, still a type of force. But keeping social peace is important. There are many people poised to launch radical crusades for one agenda or another, and while I belong to a few such crusades, I reluctantly admit, I'm happier knowing that none of my enemies are going to win, either, than to go into a free for all. It is probably for the best, in fact, that my extremist tendencies are moderated by practical considerations. Not that I have to like this in my gut....
And beyond that, government is needed to organize activities in many cases because a lot needs doing that people agree "this is worthwhile" but which doesn't make economic sense to do for business, and which is too big for or will fall between the cracks of private charity. I point to Canada's medical system...we spend less $/head on health care, and we have a healthier population in all measureable respects except for the health of those rich enough to be able to afford upper-tier American care, but too poor to actually travel to the states to get it.
More on this later, and I know it's funny for me to quibble with a generalization, since I make so many....but if government is nothing but a hammer, then it cannot capture the affection of people. I don't know anyone who worships the gun. And society needs at least an intermittent illusion of the desireability of its form of organizaiton. It's true that blind worship of government is itself a grave problem ...probably more grave than alienation of government. However, it still acts an integrative and communicative agent that does much good.
Re: Not just a hammer....but mostly, yes.
Date: 2003-03-23 05:13 pm (UTC)For me to reply at any cogent length on this, I should probably do some, you know, actual research and the like on these issues, rather than replying based on whatever's filtered down to my brain over the years. I'm not feeling up to some research, so I'll just put this simply and unconvincingly.
My understanding suggests that government is not good at things like providing free medical care to everyone. Even if it Canada is better at getting basic treatment to its citizens, my understanding is that most new medical research goes on in the US, because the US is where they can make a profit. Taxes alone do not fund the level of research that a strong profit motive will.
I would really like to be wrong. I'd really be happy for socialists to be right and for the best standard of living to be provided by a country that guaranteed free shelter, food, and medicine to all its citizens. But I just don't think they are. Maybe I'm wrong. Canada seems to be doing OK with its fairly generous social programs. But I'm just not convinced.
Minor point....
Date: 2003-03-24 01:43 am (UTC)The reason the strange type of socialism found in many industrial nations works is that because unlike Stalinism, we've learned that you need to give people incentives. If you do not allow differentiation of wealth and free availability of goods and movement of labor, people get very, very unhappy and it shows. But allowing these things doesn't mean you can't decide that maybe government should be in charge of many important things.
The thing that annoys me you see, is that Canada's system was substainable. During that fairly stressful and anemic decade, the 70's, our system paid for itself. Yes, partly on the proceeds of incredible natural resource extraction industries...but because we seemed to have a pretty good mix. Expenses and revenues grew at roughly the same rate.
Then a man named Brian Mulrooney was PM for 8 years. He said "why don't we keep spending constant, and cut taxes by about 30% of the take we get." The debt ballooned from a nagging worry to 2/3 of our tax spending in 8 years. I can't say the world would be ok if not for him. Maybe companies would have fled Canada in droves....but somehow I don't think so. The difference in marginal tax rates between the highest and lowest taxed industrial countries is about 34% of the lowest...that is, the highest is 34% higher than the lowest (which is, not surprisingly, the States.)
An even more marginal notes is that total tax rate (hidden, service fee, and explicit) is 51% in the States. It's 70% in Sweden. Sweden arguably is having some problems, showing that having the government do EVERYTHING may not be a good idea. I just don't see the picture as painting that the government can do NOTHING (or nearly nothing) productive.
Of course, I did read the bit "I'd have to do more research to argue"....I admit, I need to do some more research too. I saw the tax figures, for example, back in macroeconomics, roughly 8 years ago.
You and Dwayne should talk at some point. He's actually somewhat pro government, rather than "I hate them less than I hate corporate ogilarchy". He did some research on some "accepted facts" in my province that boggled me....
Canada does not exist in a vacuum and other points ...
Date: 2003-03-24 01:40 pm (UTC)1) Does this system make Canadians better off and by how much?
2) Does this system make humans better off and by how much?
It's easy (if perhaps wrong) for Canadians to dismiss the second question since relatively little of the world's medical research happens in Canada (even if more might happen there if incentives were different), so the effect on Canadians of anything that they alone could do to change the pace of medical innovation is fairly small.
Incidentally, economists call this type of situation a free rider problem. Canadians will get the benefits from medical research in other countries whether they contribute towards medical advances or not. In fact, because the lion's share of the cost associated with producing a new drug comes prior to approval for widespread use, drug companies have an economic incentive to offer price breaks to countries with socialized medical systems (any revenue is good since the marginal cost of tablets is so low) as long as doing this doesn't jeopardize the prices that they can charge in the world's few relatively free markets.
In contrast, the US faces a far different problem. I don't have exact statistics (sorry -- too lazy to get current ones), but the majority of the world's medical research happens here. If we were to adopt an incentive system that substantially reduced the level of medical research done in the US (e.g. by capping drug prices), the harm to the world would be large enough to probably make us worse off in the long run even though we would stop subsidizing other countries socialized medical care policies.
One option that I've toyed with as a way for the US to share the burden of medical research more fairly with the world would be for Medicare to adopt a policy loosely analogous to the way that most favored nation status works in GATT. Under this plan, Medicare would pay the lowest price for a given drug that the seller had accepted from the government of any industrialized country (chances are that private insures wouldn't be willing to pay more than Medicare). Because the US accounts for over 40% of the world's spending on health care and Americans regularly pay more than double the prices for drugs which prevail in single payer health care systems, I would expect that the short run effect of this would be for US drug companies to be unwilling to sell to European and Canadian governments without radically renegotiating the pricing. In the longer term, it would probably eliminate the cost advantage non-American governments have in health care. The only thing that worries me is that when prices found an equilibrium somewhere between US and European prices, US drug research would be reduced. Perhaps, though, European research would increase to compensate for it.
Incidentally, many of the same arguments apply to medical devices which permit new tests. I focused on drugs because they have an almost software-like cost curve (i.e. 1,000,000 units cost only slightly more than 1 unit). Advances in areas like magnetic resonance imaging can be more complicated to analyze since there are several places where costs occur as opposed to the much simpler model for drugs (where there are generally only 1-3 middlemen).
Thank you...
Date: 2003-03-24 02:50 pm (UTC)Oh, two miscellaneous notes
Date: 2003-03-24 01:59 am (UTC)PEERS. Prostitute's Education and Empowerment Rehabilitative Society. (or something like that). It's been lauded by reporters as being efficient, effective, and well run. Set up by a contemporary feminist faction that lobbied the government for funding, it's done a lot of good in Victoria for helping people who are in the sex trade live better, and for those who want to leave it, to get a "normal" life again. They actually get as much work as they can handle because since they're non-sectarian, prostitutes (being paranoid after a while on the street, I am told by the couple I've met) trust them more than they'd trust anything run with a religious slant.
The government cut it's funding, which was about 2/3 of the organization's total. Charity could go partway, but a lot of people would go without help if the government wasn't involved. They didn't point to anything and say "you did things badly, we have to give your money to people who can use it better." In fact, they've refused to comment on the issue.
Secondly, I do very much agree that the worst side of government is this attitude that people can do nothing for themselves. The way care for the disabled worked, either you did it on your own dime, or your put your dependent into an institution; no inbetween. Institutions have lousy quality of life, and we only have them for the least functional cases. However, for some reason, parents are often very attached even to someone who can't communicate or function. I guess this is that empathy problem I have (wry smile).
Recently, in Kamploops or one of the other lower interior communities, a couple killed their son and themself because their health was failing, they were broke, and they would not hand their child over to government care. They had applied repeatedly over the last twenty some years for financial aid, but were told everytime "there's only two ways to do this". Now, I understand the government's concern, they want to prevent parents from getting money for a child they may be abusing, and auditing to prevent this would probably not be cost effective.
But I think maybe they should have thought harder, or maybe invited the disabled community advocates to try and give a reasonable solution. (administrative problem solving time in government is at a premium, given that people who can see "the big picture" are not very common, in general).
This is an example of government being too pushy, trying to coerce you into doing things their way. Because they had this attitude they were the best caregivers, an attitude not really founded in fact, from what I've heard.
So, just to remind you, it's not that I don't agree partway about your basic statement. It's a worrisome problem, trying to keep people from being something government is done _to_ rather than something people are a part _of_.
Re: Oh, two miscellaneous notes
Date: 2003-03-24 07:23 am (UTC)Part of the appeal of the libertarian philosophy is, of course, the simplification of issues. It's much easier to say "Let's just give the people a tax break and let them give to charities if they want" then to work out how a federal government can effectively allocate huge resources. Part of it is a distrust of large organizations, be they gov't, corporate, or even private charities. The more removed the top is from the bottom, the more corruption gets in.
But my intent in the original essay wasn't really to convince anyone that I was *right*; I was trying to show that being libertarian doesn't mean being *indifferent*. I may certainly be wrong, or misguided, but I'm not malevolent. :)