A case for bigger, better government
By Libby
Ezra Klein articulates an argument I've been making piecemeal for some time now. We need a good, strong, central government for some things. What we have right now is not a problem with big government but rather with bad managers of the public trust who treat tax dollars as their personal piggy banks instead of a common fund for the public good.
Here's the money graf:
Ezra Klein articulates an argument I've been making piecemeal for some time now. We need a good, strong, central government for some things. What we have right now is not a problem with big government but rather with bad managers of the public trust who treat tax dollars as their personal piggy banks instead of a common fund for the public good.
Here's the money graf:
UC Berkeley economist Brad DeLong once wrote that "sometimes government failures are greater than the market failures for which they purport to compensate. Sometimes they are not." The trick is knowing which is which. But if, like the Bush administration, you are blithely unconcerned with running an efficient, effective government, funding its necessary elements, presenting honest choices to the American people between tax cuts and social investment and staffing the whole enterprise with skilled professionals, you never need make those judgments as you have neither the resources nor the personnel to effectively deploy the central organizing structure of modern societies. And that's a shame.Amen to that. We don't so much need a better government. We need better politicians and competent leaders.
posted by Libby Spencer at 10:55 AM
5 Comments:
totally disagree. The amount we pay in taxes that gets used for things like roads or something is absolutely paltry to the amount that is wasted on beaurocracy, war, and useless entities like the department of education, department of labour, department of energy, etc.
Sure, there are good people in government, but eventually they get replaced by brownies and rumsfelds. it's the nature of beaurcracy which is not a profit business and is therefore more susceptible to cronyism and laziness.
Bush has expended the government drasticly. our budget this year is 2.9 trillion. This ezra klein is barking up the wrong tree.
tax cuts are fine. they're better than tax raises. the only way they hurt the economy is if they aren't matched with spending cuts. but even then they are still better than tax hikes, which diverts money from people to the government instead of the market
OH Lester. It's been a long day and I can't possibly answer this properly tonight. But I think you're wrong. You're confusing the Bush administration with a useful government. Previous presidents have not overloaded the bureaucracy with incompetent idiots to the extent that W did.
Maybe you're just not old enough to remember what a good government looks like.
It's only one example, but tax money diverted into the Space program gave us modern electronics, not to speak of the scientific advances most Americans don't know about.
Things like the integrated circuit were probably too expensive to have been developed that early by private enterprise, primarily concerned with immediate results and you would probably not be reading this had it not been for government "diverting" tax money.
Again, just a small example.
NASA is not exactly where i would go to justify big government these days. i would not set foot in that space shuttle contraption if you paid me. I'd much rather go with the private enterprise people who are doing stuff now.
But fine, the moon landing or whatever was a good investment at the time.
But again, the good things govenrmetn does are massively out numbered by the bad. how about the vietnam war? how abuot the entirety of the military industrial complex, which has never helped me as far as i can tell, but I'm sure paying for it.
and welfare is the same as warfare. blacks were doing much better til LBJ's great society bullshit got them all hooked on handouts. rent control has destroyed neighborhoods. tariffs make us pay more for things we want and coerce us in to buying garbage.
the idea that we wouln't have the interenet if it hadn't been for big government is silly. we could have funded that research and not the other bullshit. better yet, we could have used the treasure we were spending on wars and wasteful government beaurocracy on stuff like that. stuff we cared about.
i don't doubt bill clinton has some very good people working for him and ran a tight ship with a Fema that didn't wreck stuff. and he didn't screw up his interventions half as bad as bush has. but he still set the stage for them by getting america used to interventions and big government. yuo can only be lucky for so long
http://www.mises.org/story/2582
^maybe your ideology is making a comeback after all. albeit in a hypocritically big budget private enterprise / corporate manner
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