What has government ever done for you?
How about, for the US: regulating the business cycle, the Interstate Highway System, FDIC/SLIC, Social Security, Medicare, and the Affordable Care Act, the GI Bill, clean air and water, scientific research, public health, vast amounts of public information, the Library of Congress (largest collection of printed material in the history of Earth), anti-discrimination policies, investor protections, the military, the courts, air traffic control, airline safety regulation and investigation (including as a worldwide standard and often agent), GPS and weather satellites, the West, fire protection, farm information and training, student aid and support, food and drug safety, containerised shipping (who do you think created the unified-standard demand finally fixing shipping container dimensions?)...
Municipal freshwater systems, waste removal, sewerage, electric and gas utilities, rural electric and telephone service, railroads, highway systems, post offices, standards of weights and measures (Herbert Hoover (R)), police departments (and here I particularly recommend looking up the Peelian Principles of London's Metropolitan Police), public health systems, social welfare systems, port and harbour districts, national defence, air traffic control, the Internet, Silicon Valley, GPS, satellite weather systems, major oil and gas pipeline systems, stockpiles of critical strategic minerals (to prevent market-gaming by private individuals), the Texas Railroad Commission (which of course regulated global oil prices from 1930 - 1973 -- fascinating story), and a great deal more, come straight out of government.
And yet we're told the opposite. That science and engineers are enough. That we should oppose all this good. Why?
What the Right Really Hates: Successful Programs
[V]ociferous attacks on successful government programs like Social Security reveal one of the dirty little secrets of anti-government conservatives and libertarians: they hate successful government programs even more than unsuccessful ones. Government programs that work contradict the conservatives' contention that government is bad and always screws things up. Worse, successful programs may actually encourage people to view the government and their taxes in a more positive light. So it is the very success of a program like Social Security that invites attack by conservatives. As Paul Krugman has explained, government haters "are not sincerely concerned about the possibility that the system will someday fail; they're disturbed by the system's historic successes. For Social Security is a government program that works, a demonstration that a modest amount of taxing and spending can make people's lives better and more secure. And that's why the right wants to destroy it."
https://governmentisgood.com/articles.php@aid=7&print=1
Citing Paul Krugman, “Inventing a Crisis” New York Times, December 7, 2004, p. A31.
There's a great deal else.
Organisation of the parts is itself a way of achieving a better whole
And there are modes of organisation which provide for a vastly better state of existence than any assemblage of technical tricks can accomplish. Somalia, North Korea, Syria, Russia, New Zealand, Denmark, and the United States have access to all the same technology and information. What makes them different states, and some quite considerably better than others, is how they are governed. What the organisation of the whole is.
Yes, governments can fuck up, especially if they fall into the wrong hands. That's why you fight like motherfucking hell to see that that doesn't happen, and to recover them when it does. As with virtually all power tools (and government is nothing if not a tool for managing power), it's potentially dangerous if it's going to be in the least bit useful. That doesn't make it a bad tool. But it means you want a skilled operator with good intentions.
The Mont Pelarin Society: Monopoist Apologists
The notion that government is the problem, planted some 36 years ago by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, and in 1946 by the Mont Pelerin Society, is itself a significant problem. It's the primary message of the a significant infrastructure of propaganda and disinformation, including recent posts on social media and elsewhere. This is a falsehood, propaganda unfortunately all too effectively promulgated. Discover the truth, which serves your own best interests.
Answering in part an extraordinarily misguided meme asserting, falsely, the alternative.
Adapted from a January 2017 Googe+ post.
#GovernmentIsGood #Government #BullshitArgumentThatMustDie #libertarianism #MontPelarinSociety
