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Thursday, November 08, 2007
Helping Hands
One of the hardest of all conclusions for an American to reach is this one: that his government "benefactor" is actually doing him harm. Even harder is this one: that doing harm serves the "benefactor's" personal and bureaucratic interests. Yet in the overwhelming majority of cases, these are correct assessments of government "helpers" and the "help" they provide.
This nation was supposedly founded on distrust of government. The national mindset is and has always been one of individual rights: freedom of speech, religion, and assembly, the right to keep and bear arms, the right to trade in a free market, and so forth. All of these things are explicitly honored by our Constitution; with one exception, it's the most restrictive constitution ever written. Never mind that it's ignored most of the time.
(The exception, if you care, is the "constitution" Biafrans wrote for their breakaway state, which literally forbade the existence of a government. It's a pity Nigeria managed to resubjugate them; watching the evolution of a stateless society under modern conditions would have been extremely educational.)
But toward whom, in our supposedly government-distrustful land, do we reflexively look when events take a nasty turn? Our neighbors? Our community associations? The great institutional charities? No, we look to the State!
And the State eats it -- and us -- up. Any disaster into which the State is invited is an opening in our defenses against it. Through it, politicians and bureaucrats can suck increased power, gobbling the rights of private persons and organizations, and creating a presumption that the State is the proper caregiver when times turn tough.
Nor does "help" necessarily have to be distinct from the supposed protective functions of government. Witness Larry Elder's recent experience:
I recently visited a friend who lives in the Bay Area. I got through security at Los Angeles International Airport, even through my carry-on toiletry bag included hair paste, toothpaste and deodorant. All went through the security screening, no problem.On my return flight through San Francisco Airport, however, security made me open my toiletry bag, and I received stern instructions to -- in the future -- place stuff like shampoo, hair paste, toothpaste, sunblock and deodorant in a zip-lock plastic bag. "No one told me to do that on the way up here," I said. The security screener said, "Those are the rules. Somebody simply didn't follow them."
Not long ago the government released results of a test run last year to determine the efficiency of airport security at detecting fake bombs. The Transportation Security Administration report reveals that screeners at Los Angeles International Airport failed to find fake bombs in 75 percent of tests. Chicago O'Hare screeners failed more than 60 percent. But only 20 percent of the bombs made it through security at the five U.S. airports allowed to use private firms to run their security screenings. Contractors for those five airports are reimbursed for their actual costs, with profit from awards based on performance. San Francisco, coincidentally, uses private screeners, while Los Angeles uses government employees. So which screeners were more efficient -- government employees or private ones?
And from the same column:
Before Hurricane Katrina struck, Home Depot's "war room" transferred high-need emergency items like batteries, lumber, flashlights and generators to distribution centers around the strike area. Afterward, Home Depot teamed up with the Red Cross and handed out much-needed items, including pet supplies.Wal-Mart handed out $30 coupons to Katrina evacuees, and refilled medication for patients with containers from valid prescriptions. Using its huge database of consumers' past purchases, Wal-Mart determined which goods people needed most after a hurricane. Because of its advance logistics planning, the retail giant quickly moved in to hard-hit areas with mini Wal-Marts, handing out goods. The hurricane shut down 126 Wal-Mart facilities. A little over a week later, the company re-opened all but 14.
Government intervention into the Katrina aftermath, except for the efforts of police, National Guardsmen, and firefighters to pull survivors out of the chaos, was mostly destructive. Huge amounts of tax money were spent to little or no effect. Intrusive regulations and summary decrees forbidding "price-gouging" prevented relief supplies from entering the area. A vast culture of dependency -- founded, one must admit, on the pre-existent "gimme" culture of New Orleans -- flowered and flourished, nourished by the ocean of federal funds that flowed into the area behind the waters of the Gulf of Mexico.
Would any of that have happened if the Katrina-devastated communities had been allowed and required to rebuild themselves, with their own money and effort and the assistance of less afflicted neighbors?
The subject is particularly urgent today, when so many proposed expansions of State power are premised on the assumption of government as Caregiver Number 1. Note how powerfully that assumption synergizes with the routine exploitation of children for political gain, about which Rush Limbaugh was recently scathingly eloquent:
RUSH: I have a story here from the Anchorage Daily News. "'Talk Radio's Limbaugh Bashes St. Michael Teen's Testimony -- Radio host criticized for saying Yup'ik youth was exploited.' Charlee Lockwood has never heard of Rush Limbaugh or listened to his radio program, and perhaps it's just as well. Monday, the talk radio king told listeners that Democrats were exploiting the 18-year-old Yup'ik Eskimo, and that her emotional testimony earlier in the day in front of a U.S. House committee on global warming made him 'really want to puke. I just want to throw up.'"... "'For Rush Limbaugh to make fun of young people coming in and trying to be a part of the political process, it really shows a disdain for political discourse and for the role of young people in that political discourse,' said Eben Burnham-Snyder, a spokesman for the chairman of the committee, U.S. Rep. Ed Markey, D-Mass."...I am not going to sit here and let a bunch of liberals mislead and lie to the American people about a hoax issue that they are advancing for political purposes. Now, if you're just joining us and you didn't hear yesterday's program, let's go back to the audio sound bites. I am serious about this. They can trot out whoever they want. If they're going to put them in the political process and expect that they are not going to get criticized, that they are immune from criticism, that we're just going to have to sit back and believe what they say, unh-uh. It's not happening here, folks. Here is Cheryl "Charlee" Lockwood testifying before Ed Markey's committee yesterday morning. This is the House Select Committee for Energy Independence and Global Warming hearing.
LOCKWOOD: (crying) Just in my lifetime I've seen so many... changes in our community that it just hurts to (sniffle) not be able to have our... (voice trembling) It's really scary to lose our tradition, our culture, and we've been living here for thousands of years (sob) and it's not just that we're losing our food, it's losing our homes, and -- because we are spiritually connected, and emotionally, and (sniffle) physically connected to our homes, and (sob) there are so many -- so many -- communities that are in trouble
RUSH: All right, so I did a little research. That's the 18-year-old Cheryl "Charlee" Lockwood testifying before Ed Markey's committee yesterday in the House with all the Democrats expecting she's going to get a pass and therefore they are going to get a pass. Now, she's from the West Coast of Alaska. It's a little town called St. Michael. Before she testified, I wonder if anybody bothered to tell her that it has not warmed up in Alaska in her lifetime. She's 18. It has warmed in Alaska, but, in fact, it has not warmed in the last 30 years. I have a great chart here from climate.gi.Alaska.edu. Let me show this chart on the Dittocam. The blue is cooling. The red is warming. It averages itself out. But there is a reason for when it has warmed in Alaska, why it is warming up, and I'm going to tell you about that. I wonder if anybody told Ms. Lockwood that the warming that has occurred in Alaska is a natural event. It's called the Pacific Decadal Oscillation. That's the PDO, and it changed phase in the late 1970s, which has caused Alaska and the arctic region to be warm ever since.
The more you look, the more of it you see. The S-CHIP foofaurauw. The whole debate over "national health insurance" (i.e., socialized medicine). The expansion of the "public" schools from places of basic instruction into centers for every conceivable sort of "service" and activism. Legislators' staffs dedicated to "constituent service." Richly funded departments of Health and Human Services at the federal, state, county, and municipal levels. Demands laid upon Washington for funds to succor the victims of every imaginable calamity, from the Black Tuesday atrocities to the floods in Westchester to the bridge collapse in Minnesota to the wildfires in Southern California.
Simply as a practical matter, we should prefer "help" that actually helps: that is, that leaves the beneficiary stronger and better off than before. Government "help" just about never does that, though it does justify vast expansions of the alphabet agencies and even vaster increases in authority and taxation.
Governments are nourished by war, scarcity, poverty, and disaster. They encourage their citizens to believe that times are bad, and nurture among them the conviction that bad times call for State action. Why, then, would a sane man expect a government to take effective action in a crisis -- effective, that is, in the sense of ameliorating the suffering and mitigating the damage? That would be directly contrary to government's internal dynamic!
It's particularly ironic that Americans should have come to believe that government action is the proper response to disaster. Americans are the most generous and community minded people in the history of the world; we run naturally to the aid of those in need. When government steps in, it almost always steps in between the helping hand and the victim, imposing costs and constraints that prevent private, well-focused aid from reaching the intended beneficiary. In doing so, it guarantees a vacuum into which it will sooner or later be called.
It would be nice if we could recognize this as a people.
Comments
I think it is the “something for nothing” syndrome that does it. We have become a people that really believe that money obtained from the government does not cost us anything. We forget that we paid that money into the government, actually we paid a lot more in than we will ever get back because of the gross waste in the government. But we go on thinking that when we get money from the government, it is free.
There was a time when most gambling was illegal in the US except in a very few locations like Atlantic City and Las Vegas. Most communities realized that it was unhealthy for people to be throwing away their money in the hope of striking it rich. Then the Indians managed to sell the idea that they should be allowed to operate casinos on their reservations because that was “outside US law” or some such foolishness. This then led to riverboat gambling, off-shore gambling, internet gambling and a host of other forms of gambling. People even began to make the argument that gambling was good because it could be used to raise money for good causes. But fundamentally, it still dupes people into the old idea that they are getting something for nothing, and we are really suckers for that every time.
We no longer encourage people to think in terms of the need to be self reliant, prudent, and to look to the future. We send the message in thousands of ways that it is OK to be immature, to rely on “big brother” to look after you; he is going to do it whether you like it or not, so you might as well enjoy it. This is one more form of the general subversion of the USA that is rapidly taking place before our very eyes.
Posted by on 11/09/2007 at 02:02 AMWhile I can see Dr D’s point, I would take issue with his leaning on gambling as source or symptom of the problem.
I think the desire to get something for nothing or almost nothing, in the case like gambling has always been there. There is more wrapped up in that activity than just a something for nothing mindset. A social aspect, a game aspect, etc. Not everyone that gambles is a dupe.
If we were looking for root causes, in our own country, we might be better off looking at the New Deal. There are also other possibilites, but gambling, legal or illegal, has been present for centuries and many people that have never stolen any money or taken something from someone have done it for the enjoyment of it.
Posted by Jim Sullivan on 11/09/2007 at 10:45 AMI think Jim certainly has a point in pointing to the New Deal and mentioning that there are other possibilities as well. He is correct in saying that gambling has been around for centuries, and it has been a matter of enjoyment for many people for a long time.
I did not mean to say that gambling was the root cause of the “something for nothing” syndrome, and if I gave that impression I am sorry about that. I was pointing to what I see as a symptom that seems to me to coincide in time with explosive decline in self-reliance, prudence, and concern for the future that we have seen happen in the USA. I think that the same thinking that permitted gambling to become so widespread as it has in recent years is the thinking that has caused this decline, not that gambling itself caused the decline.
We have become a nation that simply does not provide for its own future. We do not save, we do not invest in our own businesses, we borrow lavishly, we max out one credit card after another. We have completely eliminated any stigma from bankruptcy; its OK, just do it and get on with your life. That’s what it is there for! Even our banks, which traditionally have been the bastions of prudence, make these absurd subprime loans and then expect to be bailed out when the borrowers cannot make their payments. We have lost all sense of the need to accept the consequences of our actions because we have come to expect the “big government” to be there to bail us out of ever little problem. We are a mess. We need to grow up!
Posted by on 11/09/2007 at 12:04 PM
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