aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South

Wednesday, May 30, 2007

Just how big is BIG GOVERNMENT anyway?

Lately I’ve been wondering just how big our big government is. But the way I’m wondering is on a per capita inflation adjusted basis. I wonder when I read, for example, that only recently gas prices (when adjusted for inflation) beat the all-time high reached in March of 1981. I wonder when I read that the 20¢ stamp from that same year would be equivalent to 45¢ in today’s dollars (the 13¢ stamp from 1975 would cost 50¢ today). Our new 41¢ stamp is a relative bargain.

Small government types are always talking about the Founding Fathers and the Early Republic. Let’s talk then, too, and figure out just how much government per capita we had, because it looks to me like this country’s growing like gangbusters (an increase of 35 million people in the last decade) while the Right keeps yapping about the need to shrink government.

I find myself in complete agreement with D. Sidhe who, in History is Made by Stupid People (calm yourself; that title is an Arrogant Worms song), wrote yesterday:

For some reason, I’m pro-government. Always have been. People who say things like “Government doesn’t solve problems”, or “Name one good thing the government’s ever done”, or “Capitalism can do that better” baffle the living hell out of me.

Give me a few minutes, and I could name at least three dozen government programs that are important enough they need doing but that capitalism isn’t capable of, or interested in. Let’s start with orphan drugs. People with rare diseases, for which drugs aren’t available because any given company can make more manufacturing Cialis than something maybe a thousand or so people across the US take. Unless we’re willing to just write these people off, telling them, well, yes, a cure exists, but you can’t have it because there’s not enough profit in making it, taxpayer subsidies seem like a good solution.

Rural electrification, there’s another good one. No for-profit company is going to string wire all the way out to some tiny hamlet in the Ozarks for the sake of a few hundred people. For that matter, no for-profit hospital is going to spend much if any time treating the indigent in their ERs if they’re not made to. For-profit schools is another good way to say “MacDonald’s Training Academy”, and no kid is going to learn literature or citizenship or art there. Anybody want to explore the concept of capitalistic fire departments? Remember, your non-covered neighbor’s housefire can very quickly become yours, and even if the fire department saves your home, you’d have less damage if they put out the fire when it was still two houses away. Road building, police departments, prisons, the military, you want to see what happens when they go capitalistic, Iraq is rather instructive.

There’s an awful lot of stuff I’m perfectly happy to pay taxes for so everybody can use, and so no one person or group controls how it gets used. If civil courts are replaced with the sort of arbitration my bank tells me is my only option if we have a disagreement, those of us who aren’t hiring and paying the arbitrators will never see justice. If the roads are maintained by auto companies, you can just keep your bike in your garage. If Microsoft is the only source of funding for the local aquarium, you can expect to have to wait outside with the field trip kids while they hold their monthly employee banquet. When the Wall Street Journal gives PBS more money than anybody else, you can expect to see programming where some B-list columnist quizzes guests as to whether the economy is going “great” or “really great”.

So government can absolutely solve problems, and paying taxes is how we have a government with an interest in and an ability to solve problems that are important, rather then just profitable. And right off the bat, I have an adversarial stance toward anyone who tells me smaller government is inherently better--which is not to say I’m any happier with those who propose that larger government is inherently better. It’s not the size, as they tell us, it’s what you do with it.

Me, I’m pro-government too. And size, while not determinative, matters. If you look at the correlation between income and Government spending as a percent of GDP, I expect you’ll find a positive correlation. Here in the South where conservative is the norm, those with a liberal bent or made uncomfortable by the excesses of what contemporary Christianist conservatism has become will often say, “I’m a libertarian; I believe in less government.”

I’ve been known to snap back, “If you took all the countries in the world, all the places on earth, and measured those with more government versus those with less government, I bet you’d find that those with more government have a higher standard of living and greater human liberty.”

Though not precisely right (the old Soviet Union was big bad government) it makes the point. I firmly believe that larger governments are generally helpful and good. It’s time we start saying so. Yes, government must be kept in check, but with size it can sustain the stable institutions that facilitate contracts, property rights, commerce, antitrust policy, education, infrastructure and everything else that a peaceful and free civilization requires.

Meanwhile, my new retort to those who wear the libertarian label is that I lean towards a flavor of libertarianism too - Libertarian Paternalism.

Via The News Blog.