Yesterday, I had to see Glenn Beck again on TV - It was in the locker room of my club, which is full of Republicans, so I had no choice. Beck was at it again: “The government is the problem, not the solution. If you want to solve America’s problems, just unleash free enterprise,” etc., ad nauseam. And I am afraid that the message is taking hold among the American people. Wherever I turn, I hear people repeating the same clichés: “The government can’t do anything right. Washington is the problem. All politicians are crooks,” etc.
What about the perception that most politicians are corrupt? The group Transparency International ranks annually most of the world’s countries in terms of their CPI - the Corruption Perception Index: Out of nearly 200 countries, we are the 19th least corrupt. This is not stellar, but neither is it terrible. We are right behind Japan and England, who are tied for 17th place. France is #24, Italy #63, China: #79, Russia: #146. Most of Eastern Europe, Africa, Latin America, the Middle East and the rest of the world is more corrupt than we are. The 18 less corrupt countries are in Northern Europe, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada. So we shouldn’t get carried away with the mea culpa that always blames America, or the American government.
Furthermore, America’s Corruption Index would be lower if it didn’t include the private sector practices associated with Wall Street, the trade in junk bonds, hedge funds, derivatives, toxic loans, insider trading and all the other shenanigans which have brought the economy to its knees.
Does the government do everything badly? Here are just some anecdotes to refute this:
(1) When I first traveled across America in the 1960s, I was struck by the contrast between two kinds of tourist spots - public and private: On the one hand, we visited Yellowstone, the Grand Canyon and other magnificent national parks. They were all fantastically clean; the environment was pristine, protected, kept inviolate. Services were excellent and cheap. And then there were those dinosaur-land and alligator-farm types of amusement parks in various parts of the Dakotas, Wyoming, Arizona. They offered vulgar, paper mache giant dinosaurs, they were littered with junked cars and rusty farm equipment. The prairie and the desert wore the scars of “free enterprise.” This left an indelible impression on me, strengthening my belief in social democracy, i.e. a system in which the government protects the collective patrimony against plunder motivated by the search for individual profit.
(2) Recently, my wife and I received our H1N1 flu shots. We stood in line with 5000 others. It took us less than two hours. There were volunteers serving coffee and providing chairs for the elderly. The shots were free to everybody. I know, I know, it was the taxpayer who paid the bill, ultimately. But wasn’t this well-spent money?
3) Come to think of it, I can’t think of many programs than are more efficient and work better and more fairly than Medicare and Social Security. The benefits are reasonable and well-deserved by the millions of people who paid in many thousands of dollars over their lifetime.
4) State Universities are frustrating bureaucracies, you say? After years of devastating cutbacks, California’s public universities continue valiantly to provide an excellent education to ten times more students than do the private colleges, which are prohibitively expensive for most people.
5) You don’t like the US Postal Service, or the Department of Motor Vehicles? Well, try to access Intel for information, for assistance, or to find one of their employees. Last time I tried (by phone) they threatened to arrest me. I could go on, and ask you how you like the services of the airlines, or the banks, or any other major corporation, whether you like talking to someone in India every time you need assistance. But you get my drift.
The bottom line is this: Bureaucracy, laziness, corruption and inefficiency are found everywhere. But on balance, the government is no more inefficient - and it may often be more efficient - than private companies.
Of course, if we keep cutting back funding for the public sector, there’ll be a self-fulfilling prophecy, and it will begin to unravel. But the increasingly widespread belief that the public non-profit sector does things more badly and less efficiently than the private for-profit sector is hogwash. leave comment here
