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April 07, 2005

Government in Action

It's intriguing how blog posts evolve. As the reader can see, this post began over my outrage regarding a Republican fund-raising technique, but it quickly grew to much more. Whether that's a good or bad thing I'll leave to the reader.

Via Q&O I see that the Republican Party has been up to some entertaining tricks: much like the infamous Nigerian spammers, the GOP is sending doctors notice that they've been selected as Physician of the Year. All they need do to collect their certificate is write out a check for $1,250 to the National Republican Congressional Committee.

When a private agency sends out this kind of message, it's considered fraud. Yet when a political party does it it's a safe bet they won't face any type of sanctions. After all, who's going to investigate the Republican Party for this kind of thing? Congress won't touch it with a ten foot pole as long as the Republicans are running Congress (and it's even money the Democrats will jump on this as a good method for them to make money if it's working for the Republicans), and I suspect that this is the kind of mail fraud Post Office is wise enough to avoid. In fact, I'm not certain that this is fraud in a legal sense, since you've got to be pretty dim not to realize that all your doing is making a campaign donation in exchange for a pretty certificate. But there is a vast difference between legal and wrong, and this falls well on the side of wrong regardless of its legality.

I interact regularly with people who don't understand why I don't favor greater government intervention for various causes. I don't appear any less concerned about the trials the American poor labor under, from poor or no health care to the difficulties of living hand to mouth. Yet I am adamantly opposed to using the power of the state to step into their lives. Things like the above are a large part of why.

Government is ultimately about power. We give certain people a limited amount of power in exchange for certain securities. We call those people government, but they're just people, and like people everywhere, some of them are venal, some are scrupulous, and most lie somewhere in the middle. But when these people are gathered together as a government, they have something most of us lack: the sanction of the state. If I were to come to your house and tell you that I wanted $5,000 from you to cover my health care costs because you make more than I do and can afford it, I would be rightly arrested for theft. If someone from the government tells you to cough up $5,000 for taxes and you refuse, you'll be the one who ends up in jail. My intent is not to revisit the argument about whether or not taxation is theft. Let's stipulate for the sake of this argument that the government has the right to tax its citizens. That ability remains an extremely significant power. Government can come into your house and take what it wants; it's difficult to imagine a power greater than that.

Now it's true enough that our system is not a 'wild west' in which we need worry about the government taking things from of all of a sudden or by surprise. Our system of government is more like water flowing across a stream bed. It is relatively easy to predict how much of the ground will be eroded as the water flows past, resulting in few surprises. It is just as easy to predict that erosion will occur, and that it will slowly carry away more and more of the stream bed, particularly as the amount of water in the stream increases. When the 16th Amendment was ratified, Congress enacted a 1% income tax, and few observers would have believed anyone who told them that income taxes might rise as high as 10%. Yet within fifty years of the Amendment's adoption, the top tax bracket in this country was a confiscatory 90%. Just as the Grand Canyon didn't appear all at once, other erosions eventually get just as deep.

Just as the Colorado has ground an amazing feature into the surface of the Earth, so has our government slowly grown from humble beginnings to a massive behemoth. The reasons for that are no great surprise: we gave people the power and they used it. The vast majority of them doubtless expanded their powers for the best of reasons, because they believed that they could do more good that way. That's the argument still offered today on both sides of the political divide: give me more government power so I can stop terrorism/fix health care/stop illegal immigration/guarantee a living wage/et. alia ad nauseum. Each of them is absolutely correct in that only with expanded government power can they impose their particular plan, and the majority of them honestly believe that their plan is a good thing for the country. The issue isn't that people are intentionally trying to reduce freedom by expanding government, but that they see government as the best tool to resolve their issue and they're willing to expand government to accomplish that goal. Each of these expansions may be quite minor, but their aggregate effect is the sprawling behemoth we call the American government.

The American government as it stands today is the largest mass of consolidated power in history. From the millions of men and women in the Armed Forces to the alphabet soup of law enforcement agencies under federal control, the power of the U.S. government is unmatched. We are fortunate that, for the most part, the men and women who man our government are generally decent people who try to do the right thing as they see it.

But good intentions are quite insufficient. We don't know how many people are dead due to the war in Iraq, but the number is certainly non-trivial. What if President Bush was wrong to take the United States to war in Iraq? I'm not interested in determining the rightness or wrongness of his actions at this time, only to consider what it means if he was wrong. Wrong not because he wanted to avenge his father or get cheap oil for the United States, but wrong because he simply made a bad decision? How much damage has that error caused? (Please note I'm stipulating it as an error for sake of argument at the moment.) Consider a question closer to home, the 1996 bombing of Olympic Centennial Park in Atlanta. The FBI investigated and decided that the security guard who first spotted the bomb was probably the perpetrator. That news leaked, and the guard's life became a living Hell. He was eventually cleared, but only after enduring months or public scrutiny and police intrusion into his life. Even today most people who remember his name likely remember him as at best the suspect in the bombing. As former Secretary of Labor Ray Donovan asked after an intensive investigation cleared him of charges of wrongdoing, "Where do I go to get my reputation back?"

We all make mistakes. Most of us are fortunate that our mistakes are generally harmless. Even those of us who make fatal mistakes rarely effect more than ourselves and perhaps a few bystanders: tragic, but contained. When a government employee makes a mistake, however, the power of the government means that their errors are far more damaging. Nor are those errors always as egregious as those I mentioned above. Consider the sad history of rent control and the effects that policy has had over the past 60 years on the housing markets of many urban areas. Government made a mistake, and the consequences have been hurting people for decades ever since, because when government errs, there is no feedback mechanism to resolve the error. If I decide to open a business and run it on the theory that I can trust my customers to pay for their wares at an unguarded cash register because I think people are basically good at heart and it turns out that some people have no qualms about emptying my cash register, I'll go out of business. If government initiates a program designed to help people and it doesn't help, the program will continue to get dollars despite no evidence it is working (or even evidence it's making matters worse).

So it's not at all difficult for me to decide to vote against any politician who wants to implement a new government program to make our lives better. Regardless of how sincere the politician is or how diligent the bureaucrats that work on the project are, the end result will be the same: expanded government power that, once taken away, will rarely if ever be returned to the people with no assurance that the program will actually accomplish its objective. The best case is that the government program will accomplish its goal at the cost of some freedom. The worst case is that the government program will fail or even make matters worse through error and we will have given away our freedom for nothing. That hardly seems a risk worth taking.