What's Wrong/Discussion Reset: Big Government

Popular Fallacy: "Welfare" is somehow un-American.

Reset: "Welfare" is one of the reasons the founding fathers formed a government in the first place. As the preamble to the Constitution tells us: "We the People of the United States, in order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."

That's "promote the general welfare." Not "clear a space for efficient markets." And it's a purpose mentioned even before securing the blessings of liberty.

Popular Fallacy: "Big government" is inherently bad.

Reset: Eliminating the armed forces and the Department of Defense would cut the size of the federal government and its budget a whole bunch. Add Medicare, Social Security, and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation to the trash pile, and you're left with a government that's less than half its current size.

And yet nobody suggests those moves. Because everybody understands that if we want government to do something, and it needs to get bigger to do it, we're all in favor.

So when speakers calling themselves "conservative" gripe about a government program and suggest that they've identified an objective evil when they label it "big government," it's worth remembering that they have done no such thing, and that "big government" is objectively neutral. What they've actually done is stated a subjective preference, and that preference is usually that they not be taxed to have government perform that function.

Popular Fallacy: Government can't be trusted to do anything right; to get it done well, the private sector has to do it.

Reset: Some tasks are too big for private enterprise. Others aren't sure enough money-makers to attract private investors. If society needs those things done anyway, there's only one recourse.

Which is why government does the most important job a society can assign: defending its existence.

It is also why you can count on street lights to manage traffic at busy urban intersections and have a reasonable expectation that the driver approaching the intersection from your right has been taught to interpret red and green lights the same way you do.

A corporation couldn't afford to develop and build state-of-the-art defense systems if it had to count on discretionary private funds to pay for them. And society couldn't afford having the rules of the road known only by those who were willing and able to buy the education.

It's not like private enterprise is the most effective way of getting things done, either. The corporation's reason for being is to make maximum profit for its shareholders. If it can do that by building a better mousetrap, defense system, or driver education program, so be it. But if it can make more cash by providing substandard product while driving away the competition or winning the advertising battle, that'll be the chosen route. And if it can't make a profit on mousetraps, weapons, or drivers' ed, they won't get done at all.

The bottom line is that profit-driven corporations are all about promoting their own specific welfare. If they do anything for the general welfare, that's just a happy coincidence.

Popular Fallacy: Social welfare programs are nothing more than attempts to appease the over-stimulated do-gooder impulses of bleeding-heart liberals.

Reset: Social welfare programs are capitalism's best and most practical hope for self-preservation.

The McCarthyism of the 1950s uncovered communist flirtations started in the 1930s, and communism was popular in the 1930s because of depression-era poverty. When enough people start thinking that the current system is only offering them a life that's miserable, they start imagining ways to do away with the current system. World history shows what happens when the powers that be try to squash those imaginings: sooner or later, the little people employed to do the squashing realize that people they'll never be like are demanding that they lock up or shoot little people just like themselves. Before you know it, the powers that be have gone the way of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, and your country is being run by somebody with a military title.

Fortunately, America didn't handle its potential unrest that way.

New Deal social programs, whether effective or not, offered at least the promise that the lifestyle the average American could expect if he hit rock bottom wouldn't be so bad. The extra promise offered by the GI Bill and the boom that followed the Second World War made it easy for millions of working-class men to believe that hard work could give them middle class education, income, lifestyles, and respectability.

By the 1950s, the soldier or cop from next door didn't need to resent the fact that he had to defend some muckety-muck from the kid on the corner; he, too, could be that muckety-muck in a matter of a few years, so he could understand the need to keep that corner kid in check. When society keeps him thinking that he has a vested interest in the status quo, and that he isn't just some chump defending the interests of a few rich guys, society is doing itself a big favor.