Humanity has an instinct to work together. Working together is our default software setting. In fact, working together is so exciting for us that we’ve created an entire form of entertainment that is nothing more than watching a group of people work together towards a goal that is entirely fabricated just so a group of people can work together. Yes, I’m talking about sports. Why does the football need to get into the endzone? Because we want to watch the team working together to get it to the endzone! Playing on a sports team teaches valuable skills to its participants, like teamwork. Players stick to their specialties, also known as positions on the team. No one player tries to play every position, because that’s bad teamwork.
Humanity LOVES teamwork. Specialize! Coordinate! Accomplish!
Humanity’s biggest team is government. “Hmmm,” says humanity, “we sure like living in communities. I wonder if there’s a way to make living in communities even better! I know! Let’s find some people to specialize in making living in a community even better!” And lo and behold, the concept of government was born.
Let’s say there’s a big project that will be a good thing to accomplish, like building a bridge. The steps are (1) gather money to pay for the bridge; (2) find the best place to build the bridge; (3) design the bridge; (4) get the building materials; (5) prep the location for the bridge; (6) build the bridge; and (7) maintain the bridge. No one person is going to do all the tasks. In fact, the best way to build a bridge is to have separate teams of specialized people working on only one task. Then the project manager brings all those specialties together and presto! The bridge appears! This is teamwork; this is government.
If you see a problem and want to solve it, you have two options. You can solve the problem yourself, or you can support someone else who specializes in solving the problem.
For example, let’s talk about homelessness, and the government’s role in addressing homelessness. People who are experiencing homelessness are in the situation due to a variety of factors, none of which are easy to solve. What can we do about it? As an individual, the most you could do is take in one person, and you probably aren’t specialized in helping someone who is unhoused.
So let’s work together! Fortunately, we already have a group of people we picked out especially to help us work together. Let’s ask the government to help people who need housing. People experiencing homelessness typically have difficult challenges that make it hard or impossible for them to pay for and live in a home. They need help with all those challenges, and you, as an individual, might not know how to help with those issues and needs. Fortunately, there are people who specialize in helping with exactly those sorts of needs! The government can hire those specialized helpers to do what they do best!
Specialize! Coordinate! Accomplish!
We can go through this thought exercise for lots of different issues, problems, and goals.
- Let’s team up and build roads! And trains!
- Hey, how about we find people who specialize in teaching children and give them a place to do it!
- Whoa … that house just burned down. That was so sad. Maybe we could train some people to specialize in fighting fires? Or! Or! How about we train firefighters AND ask some specialists to write building codes about electrical wiring so there are fewer fires! Such a great solution!
- Oh hey, wars happen. What if we find people willing to be trained to fight wars so the rest of us don’t have to? Okay, yeah, that’s a good idea too.
- Why are those big companies dumping chemicals into the water? That’s bad. How can we stop them? I know! Let’s have some specialized scientists help our government write rules that will keep the water clean!
The point is that humanity wants to let individuals specialize in interesting tasks, coordinate all those specialized people, and accomplish great things.
This is why we have a government.
Don’t let anyone guilt-trip you if you want the government to work on a problem: “No! The government should not work on that problem! That will rot your moral character! You should solve it all by yourself!” Look, my dudes, if YOU don’t want the government to help YOU, then go ahead and turn down the help. But stop telling people who like the idea of government that it’s bad to put the government to work. And don’t tell people who need the government to help them solve a problem that they’re a burden on society.
Church Application
The Church is also a team. Church communities work together to accomplish great things — more than any one individual could do working alone. Again, teamwork is great! We don’t want to be working alone.
But there are a couple of things the Church does that weakens their team and makes it harder for the team, and the people who need their help, to excel.
Callings
Specializing in something is easier to do when you get to pick what you specialize in. For example, I love public speaking, so at Church, I should specialize in teaching (and I did). I get completely stressed out at the idea of planning activities; another person may love planning activities. Getting out of your comfort zone is a good thing … up to a point. Once you pass the point of healthy growth, you’re into a misery zone.
Church callings don’t really cater to our specialties. Instead, we’re expected to swap around in callings, and be mostly interchangeable. There isn’t a lot of agency in callings. The training doesn’t matter much either; the hope is that the spirit will inspire you. “Whom the Lord calls, the Lord qualifies.” Mmmm, not so much. Sometimes it works out. Sometimes it doesn’t.
Voluntold
The Church expects that most of its work should be done by unpaid volunteers. This works great, up to a point. It’s fun to have something fun to do in your free time. It’s satisfying to have something worthwhile to work towards, whether or not you’re being paid. Up to a point. Once you cross the line, it’s easy to start feeling resentment. If you feel your team is taking advantage of you, you find ways to push back. Since the Church doesn’t welcome feedback, the pushback may come in passive-aggressive ways. Everyone knows a guy who says yes to every calling and then doesn’t do anything. Once I said yes to three callings in a YSA ward, and then switched out of the ward back to a family ward because I couldn’t handle three callings.
If the Church wants people to work for free, then the workload needs to be either light, fun, or worthwhile.
Pushing Self-Reliance Too Much
The Church encourages self-reliance, which is a good thing. People who are self-reliant not only take care of themselves (to an extent (no one is building their own roads, for example, or writing their own building safety codes)), but they are also available to help other people.
Staffing Church callings require a lot of self-reliant people who have the time and resources to help other people. These sorts of people get scarce if they’ve been overloaded to the point of burnout. And not just by Church — if you have to work two jobs to make ends meet, you don’t have the time or mental and emotional energy to handle a calling.
Which all leads to more encouragement to not ask people for help. The bishop and Relief Society president are already overloaded. It’s hard enough to ask for help; if you feel guilty about asking an unpaid volunteer to do even MORE, then it’s even harder to ask for help.
Charity or Government Programs?
Now I get to the part where I tie this all together. Poor people need help. Sick people need help. People with special needs, or who have kids with special needs, need help. It’s hard to ask for help. It’s even harder to ask for help if you know you’re imposing on someone who is helping you only because the Church stuck them in a calling. It’s easier to ask for help if you’re asking someone who has decided to specialize in helping people in your situation because they find the work meaningful. Plus, they’re getting paid!
There’s an idea among Christians that charity is better than relying on the government. I grew up believing that. Over the years, I’ve changed my mind.
Government programs can help more people than charity, and do it more efficiently and effectively. It’s easier for people who need help to work with a government program than to impose on ward members, family, or friends. Regardless of whether you feel that, in an ideal world, people should know their neighbors well enough to help or be helped, not many people are in that ideal situation. The point of helping the poor, the sick, and the needy, is to improve the lives of the poor, the sick, and the needy. If you’re in a position to help someone, then please do so, but don’t try to argue that the government shouldn’t help because charity helps the charitable get to heaven (or whatever). Helping people is only tangentially about the helper; the purpose is to effectively help the person who needs help.
And now for the personal story. I have a son who has some emotional, social, and cognitive challenges. I’ve been rather desperate about his future. Sure, I’m his mom, and therefore I should be able to meet all of his needs and train him to function in society. But … I can’t. I did not specialize in helping young adults with special needs; I don’t know how. I get frustrated too easily; the amount of patience required overwhelms me. Helping young adults like my son is not my position on the team.
Last week, I had lunch with a friend that I haven’t seen since before the pandemic. It turns out that she’s working in a government-funded program that specializes in helping people exactly like my son make the transition from school to the workforce. She loves her job and finds it very meaningful. And I sat there and nearly cried with relief to find out that there is a whole team of specialists available to spend the next few years working with my son on a daily basis to give him the extra support and training he needs.
Thank you, government, for pulling together a team of specialists who can help my son. Please don’t cut the funding for that program and assume that private charity or his mother should be able to meet that need.
Questions:
- Which government programs have you relied on? Was it a good or bad experience?
- Have you ever worked in a government program? Did you find the work meaningful? Was it a good or bad experience?
- Are you okay with it if your tax money is used to fund social services?
- What’s your contribution to the team?
- How do you need the team to help you?
Wheat & Tares 
I have extensive experience with the national program of libraries for the blind and print disabled. It’s a fantastic cooperative program between the federal government and all 50 states. I’m a career government employee, so obviously I think that there are things that are best and often only done in that kind of cooperative environment. I absolutely believe that is an appropriate use of my tax dollars. I loved working at a job where I knew the world was a better place because I went to work that day.
https://www.loc.gov/nls/
The church has made a 180 degree turn on this issue.
In the old days (certainly into the 1990s), the doctrine (and the handbook) declared that members took aid from family first and church second, and government never — remember Ezra Taft Benson telling BYU students it is better to drop out of school than to accept food stamps? But now, the doctrine (and the handbook) has silently changed to encourage members to avail themselves of government aid (even before seeking church relief).
I once posed an idea of calling a ward or stake welfare specialist who could learn about government relief programs and help fellow members in those processes — but since the idea was generated locally (by me), the answer was an example immediate NO — not even a second of consideration was given to any merit of the idea; I think the NO was solely because the idea didn’t generate in SLC.
One of my granddaughters is autistic. Up until she was about 4 1/2 she was non-verbal and had been having meltdowns for several years. Through our county school system, she was enrolled in early childhood special education starting when she was almost 3 1/2. These fine people had training, skills, and technology that neither I nor her father have. Working steadily with her in a small group setting, she eventually was able to communicate with an ipad, then turned a corner and is now fully verbal. She has been given coping skills to avert, or at least better manage meltdowns, which still happen, but not frequently. She is now 6 and in mainstream kindergarten. Special Ed still works with her some, but the early intervention help she was able to access was life-changing. I cannot stress how grateful we all are for this wonderful experience. It was beyond “good”.
So yes, I am thrilled to see my tax dollars support social services. Not only has this changed her life, as well as our family’s lives, but it will positively impact her future as she won’t need life-long service support. The early investment in her will save tax dollars in the future. There is a lot out there that is available, but it’s not always easy to know what’s there and how to access it. That is a challenge in and of itself.
The 180 degree turn occurred before 1990. When I was EQP in the late 80s, we received training at the bishop’s storehouse and government had moved into second place by then. The trainer got some pushback, but stood his ground and insisted that that was Church policy. (For what it’s worth, said trainer also emphatically put the perpetrator last on the list of priorities in child abuse cases.)
For my own part, my biggest triumph as a home teacher/minister over the last 10 years was getting an uninsured guy signed up for Medicaid and (when he was old enough) Medicare. He had already tried to sign up for Medicaid pre-Obamacare and would not have tried again post-Obamacare had I not walked him though it.
Most important questions for any organization, team and persons are (1) What are the objectives, (2) What are the incentives and (3) What are the resources for accomplishing the objectives. Every organization, including government, has the problem of aligning group and individual objectives. Every organization, including government, has the problem of aligning group and individual incentives. And every organization, including government, has the problem of assigning the proper level of resources needed to realize desired objectives and provide necessary incentives.
I don’t see any basis for claiming government is a superior, more efficient organization. For while government tends to have a monopoly on resources – it can tax, borrow and impose laws – government historically has a difficult time aligning objectives with what people need and want and it especially has a difficult time managing incentives. Homelessness and public educations are perfect examples of the challenge. Governments spend considerably more on homelessness and on education than ever before. Yet by all accounts homelessness is a bigger problem and education achievement has declined. One reason that government and government supports claim success despite poor outcomes is because one of the benchmarks they use to measure performance is money spent on the problem! This creates objectives and incentives for government that are not aligned with the desired goal of actually solving the problem.
Consider that the problem of making home ownership more affordable is complicated by the reality that unaffordable housing is primarily a government caused problem. Government decides where people can build. Government decides what can be built. Government regulates interest rates and how banks make loans. Government then sets property tax rates and regulates the insurance people are required to purchase. And while politicians love to say they favor more affordable housing, they are at the same time taking money and endorsements from groups that want to make housing less affordable! These groups restrict land use and demand environmental regulations that greatly increase the cost of construction. Reality is that politicians are often faced with competing objectives and incentives. Their answer is to tell each group of constituents what that group wants to hear and then blame their political opposition for the problem not being solved.
Concerning the Church, there are large gaps between what the church organization says it wants members to do and the incentives and resources member have to do those things. All organizations rely to some degree on the goodwill of its members / employees and customers. The Church especially rely on goodwill seeing that lay members are not financially compensated for their service. One reason church attendance for almost all Christian churches is in decline is because people are experiencing less goodwill. Church leadership out to make it their objective to understand why this is so and take actions to increase goodwill.
If we zoom out and consider the larger framework, government programs have grown and expanded around the world. Life expectancy and overall quality of life has grown and expanded as well. Governments can be abusive and corrupt. But when held to account and transparent in their dealings, they can be of great benefit to humanity. Similarly charities can be horribly corrupt and fronts for money laundering schemes to cover up various forms of illicit profiting. Sometimes charities are scams for personal profit. Remember Greg Mortensen, the author of Three Cups of Tea (I used to love that book), who claimed he was building schools in Pakistan and building ties between Muslim communities in Taliban-influenced areas and the West? Complete scam. Governments can be efficient in holding charities to account and ensuring that they are actually using a good portion of their donations for their stated purposes.
Self-reliance, private endeavors, and action motivated by personal enrichment (as opposed to just noble virtue) are all an important part of the puzzle. But governments and their accompanying taxation, regulation, and programs, whether we like it or not, are an essential component of human flourishing. We can tweak things from time to time. Cut a regulation here and reduce a program there. Or perhaps spend more here and cut spending there. But the idea that if we greatly reduced government control and power or almost got rid of governments altogether that human flourishing would expand unabated is delusion. Argentina’s Javier Milei, the anarcho-capitalist/uber-libertarian president of the country, is dabbling in extreme experiments of slash and burn in a desperate attempt to reduce inflation. The result has not appeared to yield any results. Yes, inflation is down in Argentina. Hooray! In fact it is down to just 3.9%. But at what cost? I just read a report published today that poverty has soared to 53% of the country. That is up from 26% seven years ago. It was at 41.7% just at the end of last year. Additionally Argentina’s economy shrank in the last quarter. Milei’s reasoning is that by all of his slashing that the country will just magically resort to entrepreneurialism and that that will solve all of its problems. OK, well you need capital for business ventures to even launch. Most business ventures end up failing after 5 years. The government simply has to increase spending to offset rising poverty. Yeah, some inflation could come back, but some inflation, even it at a higher end is more sustainable than complete economic collapse.
Another aspect of this idea not usually recognized by those who think government is the problem is that there are some necessary services where it’s not possible to make a profit. No business will take on those services.
Postal service is a prime example. Businesses like UPS and FedEx have taken over the routes on which they can make a profit. What is left pretty much by definition is not profitable. And yet, people living on the Navajo reservation or in backwoods Montana still need to get mail. Most of us wouldn’t say that because you live in a remote small community, you don’t deserve mail service. So we must either subsidize USPS or a private business to take on that service. There are advantages and disadvantages with both approaches.
The same is true for a lot of our health care needs and for many of the social services cited above.
I join Janey in condemning the church practice of issuing callings/assignments to those who are utterly incapable of them.
As Janey infers, the most blatant example is sacrament meeting speakers. Most members do not have public speaking experience, and it shows. Listening to them in sacrament meeting is about as appealing as what passes for food in a truck stop hot dog machine. Is it any wonder that in the average sacrament meeting, the majority of congregants are actively watching Dua Lipa videos on their phones instead of putting themselves through the agony of trying to listen to the talks?
In addition to the pain inflicted upon the audience, great pain is inflicted on the speaker. We wouldn’t ask an untrained person to perform heart surgery. Why does the Church ask untrained persons to perform acts of public speaking? It causes the speaker immense anxiety.
I have both professional and educational training in public speaking, so I have no problem speaking and issuing verbal condemnations from the pulpit. But for the majority of untrained persons, asking them to speak is hardly an act of Christlike compassion.
I am a recipient of social benefits from the two biggest programs. Medicare and Social Security.
Neither program is adequately funded by the payroll taxes that support them.
No politician of either party will get reelected if they raise those taxes. They are sacred cows.
We have $35 trillion in debt, and are borrowing to support those programs. Something has to give.
in July I received the social benefit of a knee replacement. The hospital billed $93,000. My Medicare insurance provider whittled this down to $13,000. My share was $340.
At physical therapy I saw many other retired people just like myself, with identical scars on their knees. None of us would have been there without Medicare. Very few of us could afford $93,000 uninsured for this surgery. My doctor does 7 a day.
Who pays for this? Taxpayers and government IOU’s. It was an excellent experience. Social Security and Medicare are the top priority for government social benefits.
Since mental health was my professional training, let’s look at mental health coverage. A psychiatrist or psychologist can charge the well off $200 per hour for mental health counseling, and the psychiatrist can even offer prescriptions for depression, which the well off person’s insurance covers.
But there is no profit in doing mental health work among the homeless. And that is probably the population where the biggest need is. So, let the charities do it, right?
Charities have strings attached. I did mental health work for Catholic Family Services, and they had strings attached. Not 1/4 the strings that LDS Family Services have attached to their mental health help, or I would have refused to work there. At Catholic FS, we were allowed to do what was best according to our training, unlike LDS Family Services that still at that time had conversion therapy which was at the time disapproved both by the American psychological and psychiatric associations, and LDS FS refused best knowledge transgender counseling as “against God’s will”. And, no Catholic FS did not require me to break confidentiality to the clients bishop or priest, but counseling was actually, you know, *confidential*. But the strings that were attached were we worked on a sliding fee and even the poorest was expected to pay something and you had to be, like, Catholic. You also could self refer instead of like at LDS FS where you have to tell your bishop you want counseling and he may or may not agree, and unless you are on church welfare, you pay full price, not as much as you would pay a professional, but close. So many strings.
So, where but the government can my atheist brother go. After being abused in the scouting program, sexually by an adult he can’t name and physically by the other scouts who several times “pulled pranks” like burning down his tent, with him in it, with the scout master’s full knowledge, who never stepped in to stop the bullying. So, he would rather die than go to the church for help (he has about 6 suicide attempts or suicidal watch at mental health lock up, so dying isn’t a last choice option, so when I say he would rather die than go to the LDS church, there is no exaggeration and it is not a figure of speech.) Someone has to run the charities that do things and those people/churches can attach whatever strings they want to their help. So, Catholic Charities help Catholics and Mormon Charities help Mormons and no charity helps atheists. This is the biggest problem with expecting charities to help everyone, is charities can attach strings, whatever strings they want. And when there are strings attached, some people will fall through the cracks.
PWS brings up an important point – government services aren’t profitable. They’re not designed to be profitable, and that’s a feature, not a bug. Public transit is a good example. Trains and buses probably don’t even cover their operating costs. We still need trains and buses. Same with the post office, as PWS points out. I have a friend who is working at a rural post office. Amazon won’t even deliver in the county he works in. Instead, Amazon contracts with the post office to deliver Amazon packages. Government has to handle infrastructure to make sure that the poor people don’t get left out.
And of course, government needs oversight, accountability, and improvement. Budgets and outcomes should continue to be public. I’ve run into rules and bureaucracy that frustrated me in some programs. I’ve also learned there are reasons for some of the rules.
Government is necessary. And it isn’t a necessary evil, it’s a benefit. It’s a group effort and a team. Like any team, it takes work and change and seeing what we do well and what we can improve. But in a lot of areas, it’s the best option.
I found it a bit humorous that one of Disciple’s example of high spending and poor outcomes was education, and the other story in this thread about education was familywomen telling about the huge help public education was for her autistic granddaughter. The help for my son is coming through public education too. Our school district has some great resources, both for special education, and for vocational training. My kids aren’t in honors programs and AP classes, so I can’t comment on that. But from my perspective, my school district does a great job. Just anecdotally, I’ve noticed that the people who are most up in arms about the terrible state of education don’t actually have any kids in the public education system. There’s room for improvement, definitely, but the sky isn’t falling.
Also, we absolutely need government regulating where people can build houses. I’ve got a story instead of statistics. When I was in my 20s, there were a bunch of news reports about peoples’ dream homes sliding down hills during mudslides when we had a really wet year. A newspaper did a really in-depth article about how that city denied building permits in that area for decades, and then people lobbied, and elected building contractors to city council, and then the city gave building permits for those prime lots up on the hill. It turned out there was a really good reason to not let people build homes on those lovely view lots.
On education being a poor outcome. You’re not looking at the bigger picture. If we dissolve the Department of Education (as is commonly proposed in the Republican Party), then we get rid of Title 1. The poor go from having access to education for their kids to pretty much no education for many of them. The proposal to replace this is some sort of voucher system, which is likely to benefit only a few poor kids. The purpose of education, too, is not just to teach kids things, it is for parents to have a place to send their kids for free, somewhere that is safe and structured, so that they can work and not have to watch them. Dissolving the Department of Education and moving to private voucher systems is a recipe for making the poor even poorer. There is a lot to be improved about public education, for sure. The US is far behind other developed countries in test scores in math and other areas. But I’ll take the system where all kids have access over a system where a good number of kids would essentially go without access. Mass education has been one of the biggest achievements of governments around the world. Mass literacy and mass knowledge of basic math skills has led to drastic improvements to the economy and overall well-being of individuals. You create a heavily private system, then increased exclusion is a result, and we move a great step backwards as a society.
I have an autistic child and an autistic grandchild. Both are high functioning and programs didn’t exist when I was bungeling raising an undiagnosed autistic child. Back in the 70, unless a child wasn’t speaking or flunking school, they didn’t bother testing, so she wasn’t even diagnosed until she couldn’t function in college. We are talking National Merit Scholar and she can’t function in college. So she had to figure out why and went through testing. Because she is so smart, she had learned how to function around dyslexia and ADHD and did pretty well functioning around high functioning autism, what used to be called Asperger’s syndrome. But I had suspected the dyslexia since kindergarten and had reports from school that indicated ADHD. But she was doing alright so the school system wasn’t wasting money on testing, besides, only boys had autism and ADHD. It was just unrecognized in girls because girls learn to mask the symptoms. So, in college she is finally diagnosed with THREE learning disorders. Oh, yes, raising her had been a struggle.
Enter my grandson, my son’s firstborn. By this time there is Early Childhood intervention. As a toddler, he had trouble transitioning to solids and his parents got him into the early childhood intervention. It didn’t quite solve his eating disorder, but at least gave his poor parents tools to work with it and get him eating a few foods. Instead of the constant fight I had to get my daughter to eat enough to even keep her alive. Someday, if you have an extra three hours to listen to me rant, I’ll go through that history. But with early childhood intervention, as my grandson’s symptoms came up, his parents were taught things like how to teach him to make eye contact, how to deal with melt downs as different than standard child temper tantrums. I never had any of that help and my child and I really struggled.
This type of childhood development difficulties if caught and fixed early benefit all of society. These kind of programs exist because psychologist discovered that prisons are filled with people with dyslexia, ADHD, Autism, and other learning disorders that if they had been fixed, the child may have been able to live a normal life. But when kids are having trouble in school and are just shamed for it or punished for it, they start getting into trouble in school and keep getting in trouble as adults. So, do society a favor and support social programs. Your un-burgled house and un-raped daughter will thank you and your taxes won’t go up to support prisons instead of cheaper social programs.
I also have an autistic adult child, a couple of my adult kiddos have ADHD, and I have a couple adult children with serious medical conditions we are managing at home. We also have mental health problems in the family as well.
As Anna and Janey expressed, these problems cannot be handled just by mom at home. They require lots of expensive expertise, and the sooner and younger they are addressed the better the outcomes. Disabilities get worse and more disabling without treatment. Medical conditions can quickly become overwhelming and disabling, more expensive and more difficult to treat and manage when they are ignored. Mental health problems also go down hill when left unaddressed. Everyone is better off when full treatment is provided sooner, rather than later.
I have completed 325 hours of interdisciplinary training in Nevada Leadership Education in Neurodevelopmental & Related Disabilities at the Nevada Center for Excellence in Disabilities (NvLEND).
The single most important intervention necessary to prevent disabilities is accessible medical care available for all people, including the homeless, unemployed and poor, without extensive waiting, requirements and expense. As a society, we only hurt our selves by reserving health care only for the privileged, while allowing the needs of the vulnerable to go unattended and become more expensive and disabling.
I really chaps me when the go to for a broken government is to find the worst agency and use it as the standard, completely ignoring the literal thousands of successful programs.
Fine. Two can play this game. Is the world better off or worse off because of operation underground? Asking for a friend.
As for public schools, my mom taught high school computer courses from the 1970s to the mid 2000. She still has former students recognize her in public. Public school both educates and builds a sense of community. Every substitute neglects community. I received a great public education in Utah and my kids are a getting top notch public education in California. We couldn’t be happier.
Subtle but important point here: if you’ve been to a local zoning or council meeting, it’s very clear that it’s not just “government” making these decisions. The zoning board members and the city councilpeople don’t make decisions by themselves. They have homeowners saying “we don’t want the lot down the street subdivided so townhomes can be built”. They have developers saying “we bought these 1200sf ranch houses built in the 1950s, and want to tear them down and replace them with 3600sf homes that will sell for three times the price.” At the national level, there are bank lobbyists saying “we want to be able to issue these high-risk loans at high interest rates” — or more likely, just doing it anyway — and housing advocates saying, “uh, maybe that’s not such a good idea.”
Government isn’t some autonomous, uncontrollable force. It’s a bunch of people doing what they think other people want them do to. If “the government” is mucking around in the housing market, that’s because someone asked them to muck around in the housing market.
Brad D wrote: “governments and their accompanying taxation, regulation, and programs, whether we like it or not, are an essential component of human flourishing.”
I absolutely agree! I am a huge fan of good government. I get discouraged at times that this goal can be elusive. On the other hand, when I experience good public service I am happy and acknowledge that sometimes taxpayers do get a good deal for their money.
The purpose of my first post was to recognize that good government is not easy – and often the judgement of what is good government is in the eye of the beholder. Observe that the whole Red vs Blue dynamic in the USA is an expression of the people choosing the type of government they want. Personal mobility is a good thing. It is not so great that there is such a large cultural divide in the USA on what defines good government.
I have lived in a blue county in a blue state for over two decades. It was a great place to raise my kids. All received a good public education – the oldest ones had an exceptional education (quality of education has declined over the years). But my kids are now in Utah and it is doubtful they will return, and why? First because the cost of college was so much lower in Utah (not just BYU) they took that option. And then they found the culture and economic opportunity in Utah was superior for their life situation. Utah is no longer as affordable as it once was so some of my kids may move elsewhere.
Retirees often choose to move where their savings go further. I will likely make that decision myself when the time comes. I would prefer not to move but my state and county governments have expensive tastes.
And STH, your example of a zoning board illustrates an important point. What makes government legitimate is that it has authority to make decisions for the entire community. This is so even when “the government” is our neighbor! Other times we have no idea who in “government” is making decisions. I think the former arrangement is superior, even if it creates more personal conflict.
Lastly, I agree that there are some programs good government should support because there otherwise is no market solution. Programs for handicapped / disabled persons are one such example.
But the post office? It was great when it was the only option. Is that still the case now? Maybe there are more cost effective ways to deliver mail. Can we explore those or are we wedded permanently to the idea that the number of post offices and postal workers must be a certain number? That it is so difficult to “fix” the USPS points to the problem of competing objectives and incentives for the operation.
If you remove/reduce government; you allow the survival of the fittest which in this day means the billionaires unfettered control.
Governments work with other governments to accomplish commen goals. So we have NATO and other such treaties that hold totalitarian regimes at bay.
Governments also work together when the world is threatened such as as by climate change. Have you had extreme hea t waves, and then forest fires. Are you having flooding on the east coast.
If the billionairs were to take over government, especially one with no grasp of reality and the consequence of his decisions; it would have terrible consequences for the world. Please don’t let this happen.
I live in a purple county in a blue state. Community college is free. UC and Cal State schools hold spots for transfer students. Is community college free in Utah? It certainly wasn’t when I lived there. My children can now attend a UC school with a similar cost to any Utah university as a result.
As for cost of living, that’s more an economic question than government interference. California is expensive because the climate and the willingness of foreigners to buy houses for cash. Utah is getting expensive because the valley is almost full and the dominant religion pulls people there. TX remains affordable with their ability to sprawl endlessly and the fact that not all are welcome there.
The thing is Amazon has no desire to provide mail services in Alaska. Do Alaskans deserve mail services? It’s not a rhetorical question.