Commentary

Should government do more to help people achieve prosperity?

Leave a comment

From Arthur Brooks at the American Enterprise Institute. (H/T Mary)

Excerpt:

In January, the right-leaning organization Resurgent Republic asked Americans which of the following statements comes closer to their view: (a) “Government should do more to solve problems and help meet the needs of people”; or (b) “Government is trying to do more things than it can do well, things that should be left to the private sector and individuals.” Forty-nine percent of respondents chose (a); 46% chose (b). (The other 5% said they didn’t know.)

[…]The “doing good” philosophy cannot accommodate difficult but necessary budget decisions. It will always devolve into a drunken spending binge largely directed toward rewarding political friends like public-sector unions (witness the current mayhem in Wisconsin), engaging in social engineering (see the new health-care mandates), socializing losses (emergency loans and grants to failing businesses), and doling out pork (look almost anywhere in the stimulus).

[…]So citizens say they want government to help them, politicians oblige, but citizens loathe the result. How do we cut this Gordian Knot? The solution is a real philosophy that outlines what the government should do–and, just as importantly, not do. Our elected officials must then show courage and leadership by governing according to this philosophy.

What is that governing philosophy? Here is an answer from the great economist and Nobel laureate Friedrich Hayek: As regards the economy, the government should provide a minimum basic standard of living for citizens, and address market failures in cases where government action can do so cost effectively. That’s all.

We should acknowledge that markets are not perfect. Market failures can occur when we have monopolies (which eliminate competition), externalities (like pollution), public goods (the military, for example), and information problems (such as when people cheat others in the marketplace). Nearly all economists agree these kinds of failures can justify some degree of state intervention.

Obviously, there is plenty of room for debate in this philosophy. What is a minimum basic standard of living? And are certain services–for example, the Smithsonian Institution–public goods? How much waste can we find in the defense budget? These are the arguments we should be having.

But there are many others we shouldn’t be having, because the answers are clear. Should we bail out car companies? (No: GM would fail precisely because markets are working, not because they are failing.) Should we leave the retirement age at 65 even though people are living much longer than ever before and taking more than they ever paid into the Social Security system? (No: This is middle-class welfare, not a minimum basic standard of living.) Should we continue to prohibit people from buying health insurance from companies across state lines? (No: This induces market failure.) Do we need high-speed trains to take us to St. Louis? (No: This is not a public good.) And so on.

It’s not the government’s job to equalize life outcomes regardless of our own choices. Their job is to referee the game, not to pick winners and losers.

Videos

Video of a recent pro-choice demonstration

2 Comments

What do pro-choice protesters really think about abortion? (H/T Neil Simpson’s latest round-up)

This is why I am pro-life. I am not willing to act irresponsibly and selfishly, then kill another human being to escape the consequences of my own selfish choices. I prefer not to engage in recreational premarital sex, because I don’t want to be a party to a murder.

Isn’t it funny how people now think that chastity is weird, but murder is not weird? It used to be that society recognized chastity as a virtue, because we knew that abortions were immoral and expensive, and that premarital promiscuity made people less suitable for marriage. But now chastity has become immoral, and being marriage-minded is frowned upon.

I am beginning to see that children are basically not being planned for at all by adults. In socialist countries, feminists spend their 20s and early 30s partying, then at 40 they get taxpayer-funded IVF, conceive a baby, throw her into taxpayer-funded day care, collect taxpayer-funded single mother benefits, and then put the child into taxpayer-funded government-schools. Who pays for all of this? The high-earning, marriage-minded, morally judgmental, spiritually discerning men. Those “no fun” men are passed over by the feminists, because the government performs all the traditional male duties now – with their money. There is no need to choose men who can handle a wife and children. That’s the government’s job, now.

Wes also blogged on this story at Reason to Stand, and he noted this:

It needs to be pointed out that their attitude towards sex as a sterile, recreational activity unconnected with any biological consequences combined with their view of children as parasites are not unique. These are the predominant views of our society, pushed in all facets from politics to education to entertainment.

The future looks very bleak for any children produced and raised in the homes the people above will provide (when they choose to provide it, of course). One protester even had a sign “would you trust me with a child?”

What the above video shows is how it is socially acceptable, indeed fashionable, to spurn our biological design in pursuit of unbridled hedonism.

For me the worst protester was the one who calmly explained that she would not allow a baby to derail her education and career. She is willing to have recreational sex, and she is resolved to murder an innocent child who would cost her money. When I look at young single feminists today, that’s what I see. And 77% of young unmarried women vote for abortion. Sex is fun, but babies aren’t fun. They talk about “corporate greed”, but they are the greediest ones of all. Corporations don’t murder you to get your money, they just sell you stuff you want to buy. It’s the feminists who murder you for money.

It’s a mess. And those kids who are born from these self-centered, promiscuous, unstable adults are starting out with a 14 trillion dollar deficit on their heads, that is growing by 1.65 trillion this year. No one cares about children any more. They don’t care what children need, and they don’t make sacrifices to provide for them.

News

What is the real solution to child obesity and bullying?

Leave a comment

From the Washington Examiner.

Excerpt:

Call it the Nanny State run amok. By hosting an all-day White House conference on adolescent bullying last week, President Obama elevated a schoolyard issue to the level of public enemy No. 1, perhaps on a par with the first lady’s labors on behalf of childhood obesity.Typical of all federal “preventions” that mobilize the Departments of Education or Health and Human Services on behalf of some perceived crisis, none of the players of the conference had the guts to yank at the underlying root of the bullying culture: family breakdown.

[…]In a national study of nearly 2,500 Norwegian boys and girls ages 12 to 15 published in the November issue of European Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, researchers found a substantial statistical correlation between both victims and aggressors of bullying and parental divorce.

Given that both victims and aggressors of bullying, relative to their noninvolved peers, were also found to experience more psychological problems, the parental-divorce link should not be surprising.

The distress of parental breakup, the Norwegian researchers claim, leaves adolescents emotionally vulnerable and therefore easy targets for bullies among their peers.

At the same time, parental divorce incubates bullying by leaving adolescents, according to study, with “less monitoring, often fewer adults to confide in, and sometimes increased aggression because of feelings of loss.”

[…]Yet this common-sense understanding of bullying wasn’t entertained at the White House. If this were the first time Team Obama ignored the data, it might not be troubling.

Instead, a disturbing pattern is emerging: The first lady’s high-profile campaign against childhood obesity suffers the same blind spot. Paralleling the Norway study on bullying, recent research on obesity finds that children of divorced or single parents suffer another disadvantage to their well-being: higher risks of being overweight.

For example, scholars at the Robert Stempel College of Public Health and Social Work in Miami, writing in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health last July, found that children in single-parent households, relative to their peers from two-parent households, were more likely to be “overweight” and nearly three-quarters as likely to be “obese,” or seriously overweight (odds ratio: 1.72). Kids from broken homes were also more likely to have higher cholesterol levels and lower HDL levels, indicators of type 2 diabetes.

By not keeping up with the research, the White House ends up, as it did last week with the bullying conference, calling for greater public “interventions” by education and health authorities to address the problem.

Democrats are ignorant. They attack traditional marriage because marriage supports “unequal gender roles”, which is incompatible with feminism. They think that stay-at-home moms can be replaced by strangers and that children will not be adversely affected. And then when massive social problems result from the destruction of marriage, they resort to legislating higher taxes and more social programs – draining money out of the families that are left to subsidize more broken homes. Single mother families are the leading cause of child poverty. It’s a death spiral, and it’s going to continue until people stop acting irresponsibly and expecting their neighbors to bail them out.