A Modest Defense of Big Government

Some of you might find it odd that someone, myself in this instance, who has reservations about whether governments should exist would come to the defense of “big government,” but part of being an anarchist means  being anti-stupid and a line has been crossed in political discourse that has found it profitable to rely an vague assumptions and detest facts.[1]  Not that abstraction is anything new in politics, but this is not some abstraction.  It is posited as a metaphysical claim, a rule about the universe and its absolutely this situation that I hope to counter today.  Two things prompted me to write on this topic.  The first is Josh’s most recent post where he posits:

These snow storms actually give us a good indication about the private sector vs. the public sector and the results that occur. The private sector gets results; every business and shopping center parking lot I have seen since Friday evening has been relatively clean. The interstate highways have just gotten cleaned – 48 hours afters the storm ended.

Second, an op-ed in Saturday’s Tribune-review:

Of course, the best change would be abolition of income taxes on people and corporations altogether, but that’ll never happen. Government needs its annual intrusion in our financial lives too much — not only for a fat share of what the private sector produces, but to push people around. To nudge our behavior in this or that approved direction.

In the first case, notice the certainty which the private sector’s superiority is claimed.  Smaller trucks (Ford F150s, etc) were able to clear less roads more quickly.  This somehow “proves” that the private sector is somehow able to produce “result.”  But because it is taking the city longer to clean up one of the biggest snows in the past year, they are somehow incompetent.  I realize that Josh easily describes himself as a cynic, but part of that means knowing when to put limits on that cynicism.  I would be very surprised if every truck wasn’t on the road around the clock.  If Josh is still upset, maybe he should vote for a tax levy to make sure more drivers and trucks can be acquired in the event of an emergency. There may even be structural problems with the shovel service in Josh’s area, but look how confident he is that must be because it was a weekend, and it must be that profit is a better motivator for good.  Like I said, vague and metaphysical.

For the record the roads have been bad here in Pittsburgh, but its been absolutely in spite of the reasons Josh gives.  The early state of emergency declaration here in Pittsburgh allowed the mayor, county executive and governor to make no-bid contracts for private plow services, cancel vacations, pay emergency overtime and activate the national guard.  All this and the roads are still snowy.

In the second quote, we see an assumption that the only reason people are taxed is because government is jealous of our success, and because they love telling us what to do…I’ll keep that in mind the next time cops need to be paid to investigate a murder or a fire needs put out (here’s a thought, make fire fighting a for profit business to save on taxes, that way the lazy people will all burn to death, because if they weren’t lazy they could afford to not die!!!).  I realize that that last comment can make what I say here easy to dismiss, but I don’t see how anything else can be inferred from this comment.  Some people may disagree with with how taxes are collected and used, but really pressed to things only the most greedy (and yes, greed is a sin, folks) of us would deny that taxes are de facto bad.  The truth is there is near unanimous consensus that our roads, police, fire departments and, yes, even our schools ought to be socialized.  This doesn’t make us anti-liberty, it doesn’t make us lazy, it doesn’t make us anti-free market and it doesn’t mean that we abhor personal responsibility.

But I think the whole “big government” thing gets under my skin so much, not because it has been elevated to a metaphysical reality, but that nobody seems to be able to tell me what it means without contradicting themselves.  Does it means driving down taxes?  That’s fine, but don’t get angry when the city can’t plow its roads.  Does it mean reducing the “size” of government (either the number of laws or the amount of employees–and the benefits those employees receive)?  Fine, but don’t get angry when the lack of zoning regulations severely hurts your property values, or when the government can’t retain anybody of skill.  Does it mean you would like to contract out to private organizations?  Okay, but that doesn’t reduce the size of government, it just creates a contract that must be enforced with inspector generals, attorney’s and a host of other government employees (and the private organizaitons are now de facto part of government, with tax dollars paying their employees salaries).  Does it mean a “nanny state” that articulates and tries to achieve specific goods?  Alright, but please abandon all claims to the common good, people don’t have a right to do things universally acknowledged as harmful.  I expect you’ll also have to instruct police officers not to talk down suicidal individuals.  You’ll also have to stop protesting physician assisted suicide.  Why should the nanny state tell people that’s bad?

Of course, none of these hairy issues ever get brought up or suggested because concerns over “big government” is an intentionally ambiguous concept designed precisely to avoid having to engage on particular concrete facts.  Take the recent healthcare reform kerfluffle, it was to be opposed because it would “expand” the government, even though the CBO predicted it would reduce the deficit.  Even then, its opponents had to invent lies about death panels, or that poor people don’t deserve to not die.[2]

I guess here’s where I’m trying to go with all of this.  How do you maintain these claims about “big government” and not consider yourselves to have sided with Nietzsche rather than Aristotle?  That is to say, how can you possibly claim that big government is bad without sacrificing claims to a good beyond mere self-interest?[3]

[1] Let me just say upfront that I’ll be deleting any comment that sounds anything remotely like “but liberals do such and such.”  This is the lowest of the low when it comes to politics, and absolutely must stop if there is going to be any hope for the future.

[2] I realize that Limbaugh never says this here, but if he views his house analogy as accurate, how can the inverse not be true?

[3] Its not even that I think the things so often associated with “big government” are always good themselves, but this idea that it will be better if only it were “smaller” seems like a pretty big leap of faith to take on something that, again, has no real definition.

The Smartest Thing I’ve Heard All Week

Support Torture or the Baby Gets It!

• Its been a while since I’ve posted.  I have more free time than ever before, but I’m tired and get home with my creative juices drained.  Writing or anything else has moved to the back burner.
• Probably married to this has been that the past two weeks have been sort of frustrating.  I don’t want to get too specific, but I’d like to take a moment to get very very specific.  I’ve been trying to organize a trip to the March for Life for the county The Parish is end (it got dumped on my right before Christmas), and there hasn’t been much interest.    So, I dunno.  This hasn’t been the only thing, but everything else has been small by comparison.  Death by a million papercuts, ya dig?
• Somehow I’m still playing more Nintendo than ever, though.  Good gravy I love Super Mario Bros Wii.
• Tomorrow, after having to go in to the office for an hour or
• two, I think its finally become nice enough to take the GPS out mapping.  I think I’m going to retrace Pioneer.  I tried it once last week and wasn’t happy with the results.  I really want to get Brookline really well.  We’ll see how I do.
• Because it is exactly one month from my birthday, I start my count down to buying seeds and setting up my windowsill greenhouse.  I think I’ll be mostly planting what I did last year.  Definitely, I’m going to see if my Lavendar overwintered, and basil and parsley are still in the mix.  I wonder if I should try onions again, because they didn’t really pan out.  Carrots I’m going to retry.  I’ve been thinking about either trying to grow some garlic or potatoes.  But barring that then some peppers and greens.  I dunno.  I wonder if I could absorb the cost of a garden plot.
• Jayme and I have also been thinking about joining a CSA.  But the more I’m reading about the ones around here, the more I think they are either crummy or way to expensive.

Paleo-Romanticism at Holidaytime

Recently, I’ve become aware of a trend that I thought was only isolated to America, and then only expressed at Christmastime is actually much more wide spread.  My original belief was that paleoromanticism was uniquely linked to Christmastime.  Specifically, we all became Victorians again, prizing sentiment, valuing family and tradition, eschewing sitting around watching tv for singing carols and traditional forms of food (eggnog?).  And once more embracing formal dress and manners as we sat in the good dining room with the good china in our best dresses and suits.

I had realized that this also extended to Thanksgiving, but the more I thought about it the more I realized that that is how we act on more casual holidays like the 4th of July.  Fireworks and cookouts picnics?  We don’t really do too much of that unless its a family reunion or something.  Those are items of a gonebye era.  At least in my family they are.

But earlier this week I got a little curious about what Dwali was all about.  Much the same, there’s traditional dress, music, family visits, etc.  Shieks light 52 traditional candles.

Holidays seem to be these indulgent times where we cast efficiency and technological novelties aside.  They also seem to be happier times.  This is probably a stunning indictment of the business world.

2009 Greed Report

More than usual to report this year guys.  This is mostly because I got an early gift and then some loose cash to spend on stuff.  The bocce set, wii game and Chrisitan Prayer haven’t been shipped yet.  I chose the cheapest delivery option at Amazon (5-9 day Super Shipping) and hopefully they will be arriving sometime next week.

• The new Netbook
• GPS Unit[1]
• Some clothes
• Headset for the computer
• International standards compliant 107mm bocce set
• Super Mario Brothers Wii
• An updated copy of Christian Prayer:  I’ve been trying to get disciplined to pray The Office for years now.   I have a copy of Christian prayer, but its a hand me down from the 70’s, so the table of feast is wildly out of date.

[1] I’m hoping to take some traces of my neighborhood and upload them to OpenStreetMap

Legalizing Vice

When we talk about vice one of the arguments that’s commonly made for its permissiveness is that legalizing it, bringing something underground out into the open is safer because it can be regulated and, ultimately, taxed.  Legalizing prostitution for example, means that STDs can be contained and controlled, and that abuse may be curtailed.

The same argument is made about the legalization of marijuana in California.  Its set to be taxed heavily, and I assume that its lightened the load on law enforcement officers a great deal.  But this recent story from NPR highlighted my problem with legalizing vice.  Far from diminishing a problem, it actually emboldens and magnifies the agents of that vice who would rather not deal with regulation.  In short, it doesn’t end underground practises, but they benefit from the sense of openess created by those who have chosen to take their business above ground in exchange for increased regulation and limits.

Going back to the prostitution issue, Amsterdam has experienced a similar problem.  The existance of brothel prostituion has concentrated demand for a form of prostituion that will never be legal:  Subsersive sex acts that put the safety of the prostitute at risk.  This has been a huge problem for the Amsterdam authorties.

On Ease

Back when I worked in a one hour photo lab something became very clear to me.  Even though our heavy grade processor, paper and printer produced higher quality pictures that lasted longer, and had the benefit of being reviewed by our staff who had training in color correction and the like–even for digital pics that got brought in–people preferred to view their pictures on their poorly calibrated, off-white, computer monitors and print them on their crummy home desktop printers.  On top of this they didn’t care to learn the basic of photo editing.  I don’t even mean reading a histogram or knowing to hit up the contrast setting.  I mean basic stuff like straightening a crooked shot.  Some of this, perhaps most of it, should be chalked up to ignorance.  But what produces that ignornace?  What makes people uncurious about their surroundings?

I suspect something about the human person, or at least something about moderns, is simply geared up to accept ease over quality.  To not think about the problems or consequences of their actions when they are presented with this option.  This might explain the millions of people moving into the shoddily contructed houses that fill up subdivisions.  Or the tendency to snub local businesses for chains.  Or the desire to sit and watch tv rather than go on a hike.  The list goes on…

As much as I despise economics, this may be the one thing economics is good for.  The dismal science could be the last basion of consequnces.

Effective Communication is of Strategic Necessity for this Organization’s Paradigmatic Goal Acclimation

If you are one of the poor saps who has to endure the UPMC commercials during the breaks on the morning news, then hopefully you have learned an important lesson about buss-u-speak.  I won’t be offering an opinion here, because the example speaks for itself.

Farewell to Dell

Today I replaced my Dell laptop.  It was my second Dell laptop and my experiences with both have been terrible.  My first Dell laptop developed a bad habit of shutting itself off for no apparent reason about 13 months after i bought it.

With the second laptop the battery cluncked out four months into owning it.  Ten months after I bought it, the monitor section broke off, requiring me to carry around a bookstand to prop it up with.  That gathered many ridiculous stares.

Last April my wife tried to buy a Dell Mini.  We waited five weeks for them ot ship it, and after there were more problems we cancelled the order.

Yesterday, as an early Christmas present, I recieved a new ASUS EEE 1008HA.  Ending this dark chapter of my life.  Hopefully I’ll never be that foolish again.

The Future of my Paleo-Romanticism

Assuming my three readers actually care about what I think, I’d urge you to pay attention because this is the closest I will ever get to a political manifesto.  To that end, I should inform you that my usual no re-edits policy [1] won’t apply here, because I’d like to return to this post from time to to time and keep working on it.  The key thing I want to stress is that paleo-romanticism needn’t be a backwards facing practice, always lamenting how good things used to be.[2]  Rather, I am asking that we not be too sated with, not that status quo itself, but how we’ve arrived to it.  I am asking that we not surrender ourselves to a fatalistic “this is just how things are.”  The past can be a strong and, in some cases, corrective element.  For me, paleo-romanticism is a call to “radically reimagine”[3] our present condition and where that condition seems to be taking us.

To show that paleo-romanticism is a tool for constructing a sensible future, I offer the following seven suggestions, each pulled from the past and yet very much “new” as common sense policies that persons of all stripes may agree to.  Simple suggestions that can make the world quantifiable better.

1. Let People Work When They Want, In The Location That They Want (aka ROWE).  This has a huge amount of benefits.  For starters, people can tailor their work/life balance for themselves.  If they want to volunteer at their house of worship, or their children’s school they are free to do so.  Parents being around more would be a big boost to families and small businesses and Farmer’s Markets would be able to compete with chains and box stores.  Stress levels would decline, leading to less injuries, illness and violent crimes.  Because large amounts of people would cease commuting there would be less cars on the road, less congestion and less pollution.
2. Organize High School Like College. Along the lines of previous item, let students have options about how many classes they take a semester and when the classes are held (evening, if so desired).  If an over achiever wants to go in the summer and take a huge amount of courses and graduate in two or three years, let them.  If someone want to take more than four years and work part time through high school let them.  Finally, make high school like college in that most of the work is done outside of class.  This would breed familiarity with sources, something that is sorely lacking at all levels or society.
3. Make Your Own Energy. With Solar power and wind turbines.  Beyond just the environmental benefits (we won’t need to use Mountaintop Removal techniques anymore), self-generated power can reduce dependence on large corporations, making people more self-reliant and able to save more of their money.  The credit schemes behind financing the deployment of these technologies will have to be changed too.  Presently, saving is incurred after the initial investment has been made, that needs shifted to the frontend.  Finally, installing other energy efficient technologies will decrease the overall needed efficiency of the solar panels and wind turbines we need.
4. Make Public Transportation an Option for Families. (also, plan walkable communities) The more family members that need to take the bus, the less public transportation can compete with car ownership.  Retooling these systems for “family plans” would strengthen their appeal.  Also, just having an easy to understand transportation system is important too.
5. Local Foodsheds. Beyond the ability of people in ROWE to visit local grocers and such more easily, building a food distribution and subsidy system that favors keeping food local provides healthier, fresher and tastier foods at a competitive price.  A big part of the reason that factory farms are so cheap, in spite of all the processing and warehousing and carting them hundreds of miles, are so much cheaper is that the subsidy legislation is built to favor them.
6. Start Censoring The Hell Out of Stuff (When it comes to Children). Now that V-Chips are required in televisions, and Windows ships with built in web filtering functions, the world–or at least media–should be safe for anyone under 15 or so, right?  Wrong.  These technologies are presently available, but nobody and I mean nobody bothers to use them.  This, of course, does not prevent parents for complaining after their children have seen something inappropriate.  Its time to start out with these items turned on as tightly as possible and forcing owners to set them to the levels that they want right away.
7. Make it Illegal for Governments to Spend More Money Than They Bring In

[1] Except for, as usual, grammar and readability.
[2] Like with hipsters and cartoon shows, when they were kids
[3] But not like remakes on TV