Government Cannot Solve Every Societal Problem

By Michael Tanner

Wednesday, January 31, 2018

The Western world can breathe easy. British prime minister Theresa May has solved one of the great crises of our time: She has appointed a Minister of Loneliness. Tracey Crouch, who is currently the Tory undersecretary for Sports and Civil Society, will be charged with leading a government-wide effort to “develop a strategy” for ending “loneliness and social isolation” among adults.

It is easy to have a laugh at the expense of the Brits, of course, although just last year President Obama’s surgeon general, Dr. Vivek Murthy, wrote an article for the Harvard Business Review arguing that the societal problem of loneliness needs more attention from business and government. But there is something bigger at work here. There is now a general belief, one increasingly shared by politicians and voters of both parties, that every problem, large or small, can only be solved by the government.

The Declaration of Independence says that governments are instituted among men to secure our unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Today, too many people see government as the solution to whatever ails us.

Obesity a problem? We need the government to regulate what we eat. Wages too low? The government should set them. Are people doing things that you think are immoral? Criminalize those things. “There ought to be a law” has become the all-purpose political rallying cry.

And while omnipresent government may be the ethos of modern politics, it does not come without a cost.

The most obvious one, of course, is the modern leviathan state. We have a federal government that spends more than $4 trillion per year, is $20 trillion in debt, and regulates nearly every aspect of our lives. State and local governments follow suit. From our bedrooms to our businesses, there seems no area of our lives that lawmakers don’t believe it is their job to oversee, restrict, subsidize, or otherwise intrude upon.

This leaves us poorer, of course, but it also leaves us less free. In the most recent Human Freedom Index, which looks at both economic and personal liberties, the United States ranks 17th. As Gerald Ford once said, “A government big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take away everything you have.”

Moreover, those who rely on government to solve all problems will likely be disappointed. Most government programs are at best a failure and at worst do active harm to society and the people they purport to help. As Milton Friedman once put it, “If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in five years there would be a shortage of sand.”

Civil society — that vast conglomeration of activity undertaken by individuals in the absence of government coercion — has proven to do far more good. Yet, insidiously, our over-reliance on government saps the vitality of civil society and non-government alternatives. “If government is not seen as a legitimate source of intervention, individuals and associations will respond,” Charles Murray once noted. “If instead government is permitted to respond, government will seize the opportunity, expand on it, and eventually take over altogether.”

Moreover, relying on government to solve every problem in society inevitably leads to political disagreements about how to solve those problems. If everything in our lives becomes political, then there is no respite from the political. This can only increase the polarization of society, driving Americans farther into their respective bunkers.

Obviously, there is a proper role for government, and the limits of that role will always be the subject of political debate. But perhaps the next time we encounter a problem in society, we should think twice before asking government to solve it for us.

2018 Is a Great Time to Be Alive

By Ben Shapiro

Wednesday, January 31, 2018

One of the more tiresome lines we hear over and over from our politicians is this: The world is worse today than it was yesterday. The rich are getting richer while the poor get poorer. A dollar doesn’t go as far as it used to. Our futures are less bright every day. As of June 2017, a full 58 percent of Americans believed their children would be worse off financially than their parents, while just 37 percent thought the opposite.

That dark perspective came to my mind as I traveled to the University of Connecticut last week. While I was waiting to speak, I browsed my iPhone (invented 2007). I then walked up to the microphone (invented in 1964) and spoke to some 500 students, as well as thousands of others watching via digital livestreaming (invented in 1993) and thousands more who would watch later on YouTube (launched in 2005). The entire event was filmed on a series of digital cameras (invented 1975). When I finished, I tweeted about how things had gone (Twitter launched in 2006).

By the time I got back to my hotel, I had a pretty bad headache. Luckily, I took a couple of Advil (first made publicly available in the United States in 1974), and that alleviated the pain. Then I watched a show on Netflix (launched in 1997) after searching the reviews on Google (launched in 1998). Finally, I used my electric toothbrush (first invented in 1954), climbed into bed, and read a book I’d ordered from Amazon (launched in 1994).

The next morning, my security escorted me to the airport, where I used my digital ticket to scan in (a service that only became available to consumers in the 2000s). Then I walked past the televisions showing CNN (launched in 1980) and Fox News (launched in 1996), plunked myself down in a seat, and began checking my email (made publicly available in 1983) via wireless internet (the Wi-Fi 802.11 standard was established in 1997) on my MacBook Pro (this version from 2015). Finally, we boarded the passenger 747 (first flown in 1970) and took off while I watched videos of my children on WhatsApp (launched in 2009) and listened to Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto (finalized in 1721, but only made available for digital streaming via the iTunes store in 2003). When I finally reached my destination, I ordered a Lyft (launched in 2012).

All of which is to say that in a free, capitalist system, things are always getting better. My grandmother spent the first three decades of her life with precisely none of the amenities I mentioned above, which only constitute a short list. There are so many life-changing advancements we take for granted today that it’s hard to single them all out. Our quality of life is significantly better than it has ever been. Our houses are bigger, even though our families are smaller: The average size of a newly built home is 2,687 square feet, compared with about 1,700 square feet in 1980. We’re living longer: In 1980, our life expectancy was 73.6 years, but as of 2010, it was 78.7. And we’re healthier: Elderly members of our population are living and maintaining high cognitive function for longer.

The power of our system hasn’t just meant better lives for our own citizens: It’s also meant better lives for billions of folks all over the world. As of 1990, 37.1 percent of people on Earth lived on less than $1.90 per day; by 2015, that number had declined to 9.6 percent. Life expectancy worldwide was 71.5 years as of 2015, an increase of five years since 2000. Infant mortality has dropped precipitously, from 64.8 deaths per 1,000 live births in 1990 to 30.5 deaths per 1,000 live births in 2016.

So yes, things are getting a lot better, and if you don’t notice, that’s only because they’re getting better incrementally. Politicians who tell you that you’re doing worse than you were in 1970 are lying. Look at the phone or computer on which you’re reading this. Nearly every aspect of the world around you is subtly different than it was 70, 50, or even ten years ago. That’s thanks to free-market economics, competition, and the creativity of the human mind. Stand with the forces that made such progress possible and the future will be bright. Stand against those forces and we may have real reason for pessimism in the not-too-distant future.

Night of the Peacock

By Kevin D. Williamson

Tuesday, January 30, 2018

Washington loves its initialisms, its acronyms and pseudo-acronyms: the PATRIOT Act, the Opportunity KNOCKS Act (ye gods: the Opportunity Kindling New Options for Career and Knowledge Seekers Act), and POTUS with its dog-Latin suggestion of virile power. And tonight is the State of the Union address — inevitably, the “SOTU.”

I’d prefer a little STFU.

It’s rare for a writer of journalism (which literally means writing daily, from the Acta Diurna) to confess that he’s actually said all he has to say about a subject, but I think I said all I have to say about the State of the Union itself — its detestable un-American pageantry — a few years ago, if only because I exhausted my vocabulary of denunciation:

The annual State of the Union pageant is a hideous, dispiriting, ugly, monotonous, un-American, un-republican, anti-democratic, dreary, backward, monarchical, retch-inducing, depressing, shameful, crypto-imperial display of official self-aggrandizement and piteous toadying, a black Mass during which every unholy order of teacup totalitarian and cringing courtier gathers under the towering dome of a faux-Roman temple to listen to a speech with no content given by a man with no content, to rise and to be seated as is called for by the order of worship — it is a wonder they have not started genuflecting — with one wretched representative of their number squirreled away in some well-upholstered Washington hidey-hole in order to preserve the illusion that those gathered constitute a special class of humanity without whom we could not live. It’s the most nauseating display in American public life — and I write that as someone who has just returned from a pornographers’ convention.

The first State of the Union address was delivered with befitting republican modesty by George Washington. Thomas Jefferson, forever guarded against royalist temptations, did the republic the great favor of replacing Washington’s speech with a letter to Congress, and for a wonderful century there was silence, with the State of the Union letter arriving in Congress with no more pomp and circumstance than IBM’s annual report to its shareholders. Woodrow Wilson, the closest thing this country has ever had to a genuine fascist in the presidency, reinstated the address, one of the many disfiguring scars he left on our body politic. In 2014, I wrote of my hope that “the next Republican president should remember why his party is called the Republican party and put a stop to this.”

I had not considered the possibility of the golden toilet.

Trump’s genius, if he has any, is in marketing. He understands the power of ritual and the human need for it. Because he gives the impression of being only barely literate, Trump isn’t very good at making speeches, but he excels at presiding over rallies. He had the wit to give his movement a uniform, an order of worship, and a hymnal. In classical literature, an “epithet” isn’t an insult but a description of a particular god or hero’s attributes: Athena Parthenos is Athena the maiden, Athena Polias is Athena the guardian of the city named for her. Trump revived the epithet in both senses of the word: Low-Energy Jeb, Crooked Hillary, the Failing New York Times. He is the bouncing ball that his audience sings along with — he is a wave, he’s not the water.

Trump has a sense of style — specifically, he has Liberace’s sense of style, all that phony gilding and those imitation Louis XV fauteuils and that hideous Alva Vanderbilt–style Fifth Avenue Bourbon pretense. But it is a style. In a political world full of men whose very souls wear blue blazers, Trump is cheerfully shrugging off revelations about hush money paid to porn stars: The world is grown so bad that peacocks make prey where eagles dare not perch.

The Republican party has come a long way from Calvin Coolidge — a long way down. The GOP always has had its share of big talkers — Lincoln, Reagan — but it has become the Party That Won’t Shut Up, the party of Lewis Prothero and Lonesome Rhodes, Elmer Gantry denouncing those smart-aleck college professors, Donald Trump seething about the losers and haters and preening about his ratings. What will Donald Trump make of the State of the Union address? It’s worth considering that the man was in the literal pageant business.

“The trouble with us is that we talk about Jefferson but do not follow him,” Coolidge once said.

Maybe the trouble with us is that we talk, and talk and talk and talk . . .