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seawaspThoughts I had to get down. Not sure it's fully complete as is, but I needed to write it down.
One of the common Libertarian/Right Wing tricks is to try to frame a discussion about the government and its spending as though it were a family budget, and how a properly run family just doesn't run deficits.
This analogy, of course, has a lot of obvious flaws, but one that is often glossed over is that in general, the adults running a household can, in fact, understand the overall budget. Not just where the money goes, but why it has to go there, what the tradeoffs are for changing what you spend on what ("Well, yes, we can not buy new clothes for a few months, but then we'll have to buy a lot MORE when we finally do it", "We can put off the power bill until next week, but after that we'll have the NEXT power bill on top of it", "if we pay this bill right now, it'll save us money down the line")
For a small community with a generally unified culture and purpose, the local government could be almost as easy to understand.
For a country of 350 million, no human being could even begin to comprehend all of the factors in play.
More importantly, though, a government doesn't work at all like a family, or a company. The government's job is not to make money, nor is it to support one particular group of people. It's to maintain a STRUCTURE of order, in which the millions of people can live and have their needs met with a minimal amount of interpersonal conflict, and which provides mechanisms to address injustices of one form or another, balancing the rights and needs of all the different people and organizations under its protection.
Because of this, the types of services and resources a modern government should be expected to provide are primarily those whose benefits are both very large when summed across the entirety of the country, and ALSO are very spread-out -- diffuse -- in a manner that makes them impractical for individuals to either perform or reasonably directly benefit from, and similarly that are unattractive in general to corporations because their ROI is either very long-term, or is not of a sort that can be easily turned into a profit at all.
The general health of the population is one example. If everyone in your population receives appropriate health maintenance care -- regular checkups, quick addressing of minor issues before they become major, immunizations kept up to date, etc. -- this benefits the population as a while across all areas -- rich, poor, young, old, small and large businesses, etc. -- by drastically reducing the number of people who are significantly ill at any given time. The population is, in general, more productive, requires less health-oriented expenditures, and so on.
But to DO this is an expensive undertaking in and of itself, and not one that provides a VISIBLE return. It improves the overall country -- but no one person or easily-defined group of people could turn a profit on it. Indeed, the benefit is very nearly invisible to a simple viewing, and will be overlooked very easily, despite the actual scale of the benefit being huge (a significant percentage of the available labor-hours of the entire population). Human beings SUCK at noticing such diffuse benefits, to the point that they will discount the effort it took to achieve them as being wasted.
This extends to other kinds of preventative effort -- the Y2K problem was a real, and potentially devastating, problem derived from the design of computer systems in the early computing era. It turned out to not cause any disasters -- because literally tens of thousands of people worked for thousands of hours to address all the major areas where that rollover date could cause real trouble. Many people then decided the whole problem had been overhyped.
Nowhere on the Right is this phenomenon more obvious than in the constant battle to remove regulations, worker protections, and unions. Oh, the very rich people (like Elon) have some objective business reasons to fight against any such controls, but it's more concerning that so many NON-rich people believe that these kind of things are stifling their opportunities.
Yet -- as is often said -- "your regulations are written in blood". Safety regulations, like those for OSHA, were not enacted in a vacuum; they were enacted because yes, a company DID choose to remove protective items in order to speed up production; because yes, someone DID send little kids under the moving machinery to help keep things running more smoothly; because indeed, the company would dump toxic waste into the nearby river without considering the people downstream.
Similarly, the organized labor lovement and the worker protections it convinced our government to put into place became so ingrained that people -- especially on the Right -- came to INTERNALIZE them, assume this was "normal" and that therefore there was no NEED for so many rules that prevent "common sense" business practices.
The government exists partly because "common sense" ISN'T -- isn't common, or sometimes isn't sense. What seems perfectly reasonable and normal to a person thinking about something casually may not apply to the way a corporation addresses a problem.
I have previously mentioned the problem with modern corporations (well, one of them): they are not responsible to their customers, nor their workers, but to their stockholders, investors who have no particular connection to the WORK done by the company. For this reason, you CANNOT use the "common sense" argument of the 'competitive market" that Libertarians and Right-Wingers like to use -- that of COURSE a company will make its products safe, because less-safe ones will be outcompeted.
That would work, to some extent at least, if the companies were directly responsive towards their customers and workers, but as they are not, their "common sense" actions are "what will make the stock price rise". If the answer is "reducing our costs by risky moves that will kill a few workers a year", then more workers will start dying.
It's the job of the government to prevent such things. It's the job of the government to address other diffuse issues -- poverty, for example -- that are not in the reasonable purview of individuals or private industry.
Obviously, this is partly dependent on your most basic moral positions: do you value human lives as such? Judging from their actions, it would appear that a large number of the far-right do not; they value lives that produce specific value for them, but not just humans for existing. This of course explains why social programs are anathema to such people; it's potentially helping people who do not produce "value", however they may define it. (the discussion of the whole "deserve it/work for it/suffer for it" attitude is, alas, another topic).
But if, like I do, you believe that human beings are themselves intrinsically worth something, then that implies that taking care of ALL human beings is, inherently, the right thing to do -- and from that, follows the need for governments that recognize that essential truth.
The problem of diffuse understanding takes its toll even if we accept that basic truth, though, because human beings can't see, nor understand, the broad effects and consequences of their actions, especially in the context of millions of others. By chaos theory, even a small action by one person could ultimately lead to immense changes across the globe, but we can't SEE those interrrelationships, can't observe how the fact that we decided to buy one more package of pens was the difference between that vendor closing that week, which meant that the manufacturer of the pens got another order they needed, which meant that an employee was retained and got paid, and was able to make sure their kid got to the doctor's, and so on and so forth.
This makes it easy to remove pieces of a governmental structure whose overall effects are spread out in this diffuse, hard-to-grasp way. You can't really see how it's accomplishing much -- and maybe all it's doing is holding a metaphorical finger in a dike. The thing is, removing that tiny bit of support can ultimately lead to a catastrophe... but it's going to be hard to demonstrate until it's too late.
One of the common Libertarian/Right Wing tricks is to try to frame a discussion about the government and its spending as though it were a family budget, and how a properly run family just doesn't run deficits.
This analogy, of course, has a lot of obvious flaws, but one that is often glossed over is that in general, the adults running a household can, in fact, understand the overall budget. Not just where the money goes, but why it has to go there, what the tradeoffs are for changing what you spend on what ("Well, yes, we can not buy new clothes for a few months, but then we'll have to buy a lot MORE when we finally do it", "We can put off the power bill until next week, but after that we'll have the NEXT power bill on top of it", "if we pay this bill right now, it'll save us money down the line")
For a small community with a generally unified culture and purpose, the local government could be almost as easy to understand.
For a country of 350 million, no human being could even begin to comprehend all of the factors in play.
More importantly, though, a government doesn't work at all like a family, or a company. The government's job is not to make money, nor is it to support one particular group of people. It's to maintain a STRUCTURE of order, in which the millions of people can live and have their needs met with a minimal amount of interpersonal conflict, and which provides mechanisms to address injustices of one form or another, balancing the rights and needs of all the different people and organizations under its protection.
Because of this, the types of services and resources a modern government should be expected to provide are primarily those whose benefits are both very large when summed across the entirety of the country, and ALSO are very spread-out -- diffuse -- in a manner that makes them impractical for individuals to either perform or reasonably directly benefit from, and similarly that are unattractive in general to corporations because their ROI is either very long-term, or is not of a sort that can be easily turned into a profit at all.
The general health of the population is one example. If everyone in your population receives appropriate health maintenance care -- regular checkups, quick addressing of minor issues before they become major, immunizations kept up to date, etc. -- this benefits the population as a while across all areas -- rich, poor, young, old, small and large businesses, etc. -- by drastically reducing the number of people who are significantly ill at any given time. The population is, in general, more productive, requires less health-oriented expenditures, and so on.
But to DO this is an expensive undertaking in and of itself, and not one that provides a VISIBLE return. It improves the overall country -- but no one person or easily-defined group of people could turn a profit on it. Indeed, the benefit is very nearly invisible to a simple viewing, and will be overlooked very easily, despite the actual scale of the benefit being huge (a significant percentage of the available labor-hours of the entire population). Human beings SUCK at noticing such diffuse benefits, to the point that they will discount the effort it took to achieve them as being wasted.
This extends to other kinds of preventative effort -- the Y2K problem was a real, and potentially devastating, problem derived from the design of computer systems in the early computing era. It turned out to not cause any disasters -- because literally tens of thousands of people worked for thousands of hours to address all the major areas where that rollover date could cause real trouble. Many people then decided the whole problem had been overhyped.
Nowhere on the Right is this phenomenon more obvious than in the constant battle to remove regulations, worker protections, and unions. Oh, the very rich people (like Elon) have some objective business reasons to fight against any such controls, but it's more concerning that so many NON-rich people believe that these kind of things are stifling their opportunities.
Yet -- as is often said -- "your regulations are written in blood". Safety regulations, like those for OSHA, were not enacted in a vacuum; they were enacted because yes, a company DID choose to remove protective items in order to speed up production; because yes, someone DID send little kids under the moving machinery to help keep things running more smoothly; because indeed, the company would dump toxic waste into the nearby river without considering the people downstream.
Similarly, the organized labor lovement and the worker protections it convinced our government to put into place became so ingrained that people -- especially on the Right -- came to INTERNALIZE them, assume this was "normal" and that therefore there was no NEED for so many rules that prevent "common sense" business practices.
The government exists partly because "common sense" ISN'T -- isn't common, or sometimes isn't sense. What seems perfectly reasonable and normal to a person thinking about something casually may not apply to the way a corporation addresses a problem.
I have previously mentioned the problem with modern corporations (well, one of them): they are not responsible to their customers, nor their workers, but to their stockholders, investors who have no particular connection to the WORK done by the company. For this reason, you CANNOT use the "common sense" argument of the 'competitive market" that Libertarians and Right-Wingers like to use -- that of COURSE a company will make its products safe, because less-safe ones will be outcompeted.
That would work, to some extent at least, if the companies were directly responsive towards their customers and workers, but as they are not, their "common sense" actions are "what will make the stock price rise". If the answer is "reducing our costs by risky moves that will kill a few workers a year", then more workers will start dying.
It's the job of the government to prevent such things. It's the job of the government to address other diffuse issues -- poverty, for example -- that are not in the reasonable purview of individuals or private industry.
Obviously, this is partly dependent on your most basic moral positions: do you value human lives as such? Judging from their actions, it would appear that a large number of the far-right do not; they value lives that produce specific value for them, but not just humans for existing. This of course explains why social programs are anathema to such people; it's potentially helping people who do not produce "value", however they may define it. (the discussion of the whole "deserve it/work for it/suffer for it" attitude is, alas, another topic).
But if, like I do, you believe that human beings are themselves intrinsically worth something, then that implies that taking care of ALL human beings is, inherently, the right thing to do -- and from that, follows the need for governments that recognize that essential truth.
The problem of diffuse understanding takes its toll even if we accept that basic truth, though, because human beings can't see, nor understand, the broad effects and consequences of their actions, especially in the context of millions of others. By chaos theory, even a small action by one person could ultimately lead to immense changes across the globe, but we can't SEE those interrrelationships, can't observe how the fact that we decided to buy one more package of pens was the difference between that vendor closing that week, which meant that the manufacturer of the pens got another order they needed, which meant that an employee was retained and got paid, and was able to make sure their kid got to the doctor's, and so on and so forth.
This makes it easy to remove pieces of a governmental structure whose overall effects are spread out in this diffuse, hard-to-grasp way. You can't really see how it's accomplishing much -- and maybe all it's doing is holding a metaphorical finger in a dike. The thing is, removing that tiny bit of support can ultimately lead to a catastrophe... but it's going to be hard to demonstrate until it's too late.
no subject
Date: 2025-02-08 04:00 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-02-08 05:18 pm (UTC)Mike Harris campaigned on telling everyone that nurses were useless, gutted nursing training programs, and laid off thousands of publicly-funded nurses. He called nurses as obsolete and unnecessary as hula hoops.
https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/michael-deane-harris
Two years after leaving office, with people suffering due to the lack of publicly-funded nurses, Mike Harris was the director of Chartwell, a company providing private nurses to rich people. If he hadn't demolished the universally-available structure, there wouldn't be the opportunity to extract profit from the ruins.
https://canadians.org/analysis/mike-harris-raking-profits-long-term-care-system-he-helped-create/
If a dike bursts and floods the land, the yacht market just became more profitable.
no subject
Date: 2025-02-11 06:52 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-02-11 10:50 pm (UTC)