Problems with the Problem-with-Government Problem

The main problem with government is that, sometimes, it doesn’t work very well.

Sometimes it is because the issues are complex, not completely understood and the wrong decisions are made by well-meaning people.

But sometimes it happens because those in charge do not want government to work and decisions are made that ensure that it can’t.

The former version isn’t all that common but does pop up and can be disconcerting. A disturbing recent example is the ongoing problem at several VA centers where vets have to wait for unconscionably long time periods for service and care. The difficulties emerged from two poor decisions. The number of vets returning from the Middle East misadventures and needing services was greater than anticipated and someone, somewhere, made poor decisions about the software to use in record-keeping. The result was a huge backlog of veterans who couldn’t even get their paperwork into the system and, for those who did, ridiculously long waits.

No one is happy when bureaucratic cock-ups like this happen. Interestingly, they are independent of partisan slant and occur under both left-leaning (Obama and the VA) and right-tilting (Bush and Katrina) governments. They happen when lots of people are involved in making many decisions in a complex domain.

The latter version occurs when governmental officials make decisions that are either known to have little chance of working or are motivated by values that are antithetical to government. Screw-ups of this type are painfully common and, when seen in their fullest context, devastating. As Rachel Maddow revealed in her overview of the series of debacles in the state of Michigan since Rick Snyder became governor (culminating in the crisis in Flint), it’s all easily traced to a desire to shrink government.

The lens through which each is viewed depends on your larger socio-political framework — and this, folks, is where the partisanship comes rolling in.

There’s wisdom in Barney Frank’s famous line, “Government is just what people do when they get together.” When societies grow they necessarily become more complex. Over time a social scaffolding emerges so that the system can be, in a word, governed. Typically the people who get involved, who do the jobs that need doing, who form the committees and establish the regulations and standards do so out of a sense of duty and an altruistic commitment to the greater good. We call them civil servants for that is what they are.

There is nothing inherently wrong with government. No large-scale society could exist without one, and the larger the society the larger the government will have to be. Can it screw up? Sure. Poor decisions are made; cumbersome regulations can get into the system and make life difficult; unforeseen complexities that agencies aren’t prepared for emerge. But when these things happen, when we confront these “problems with government,” the sensible reaction shouldn’t be to dismantle the offending branch of government. It should be to repair it. Fund it if it’s underfunded; change the regulations if they are stifling innovation; shave the bureaucratic excesses off if the agency’s grown too big for its own good.

If the VA implodes the proper response is to increase funding, add health-care providers and hire a couple of software gurus who know how to write code.

On the other side of this ideological coin is the infamous line from Grover Norquist: “I want to shrink government to the point where I can drown it in a bathtub.” Here the underlying socio-political theory assumes that functions that serve the greater good are best handled, not by tax-supported governmental agencies, but by the private sector.

But this debate cannot take place without asking a deeper question: What functions of a modern society are we talking about? A Norquist’er would say, “just about all.” A Snyder would likely echo, “yup.”

My position, which is widely shared, is simple. I don’t disagree with the role of the private sector but think it should be circumscribed. There are critical domains of a modern society that it should not be involved in — the ones that impact all its citizens. In these government should be in charge and its role is to develop and maintain properly run agencies that improve a society’s overall well-being and foster increases in the quality of life of its citizens.

At the Federal (and to some extent, state) level these include health care (ACA, Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, FDA, CDC), the environment (EPA, DOT, DOA), defense (military, FBI, CIA, DHS), public safety (police, fire, sanitation), justice (DOJ, courts, prisons), education (DOE), scientific research (NSF, NIH, NASA) and the arts (NEH, NEA). These are the province of government. Right now virtually all are grotesquely underfunded (the military being the exception) and their budgets should be increased and funded by a revised, sharply progressive tax code.

All the rest can be handled by a sensibly regulated private sector. I call my program “Bleeding Heart Capitalism” others may know it as “Democratic Socialism.”

Privatization cannot work across the board because the motives of the individuals involved are antithetical to the needs of a complex, diverse society. From an idealistic point of view those who are motivated to work in governments do so because of a desire to improve the lives of all. They’re comfortable with modest salaries, equally modest working conditions and the sense that what they do is useful.

When private firms enter these domains they bring with them an entirely different ethic. Profits become paramount, keeping the share-holders happy transcends concerns about the greater good. Regulations are not to be devised for the welfare of the community, they are to be avoided, worked-around or scrapped. Empathy takes a back seat to motivated self-interest. Greed trumps charity.

Governmental agencies will, must, function according to larger regulatory programs designed to protect the environment, ensure public safety and support those who use its services.

Private corporations will, must, function with an eye toward market forces, competitive circumstance and long-term financial gain.

When I compose these blogs I try (I really do) to give the other side the benefit of the doubt. There are more than a few conservatives whom I respect and I rarely believe that their motives are venal or their aims unethical. But in the matter of which side of this “problems-with-government” issue one comes down on, it’s hard not to conclude that many of those on the Norquist side are actively, consciously trying to undermine the operations of governments and use the failures as justification for privatization.

When the Tea Party types in Congress engineer a governmental shutdown it’s motivated, at least in part, by a desire to force government to fail. When Rick Snyder tries to save a couple of million dollars by privatizing the operations of a VA hospital you can almost hear him chuckling as he watches the collapse of the program. When Kansas finds itself in a huge financial hole because Sam Brownback and his Republican-run legislature passed bizarrely huge tax cuts, smiles can be seen at the edges of tightly-drawn lips.

The problem with government isn’t “government.” It’s the anti-government forces undercutting the operations of governments. Governments serve everyone. The private sector serves the stockholders. 

Stopping Trump: What the GOP is Missing

Romney made a bombastic and amusing speech trying his very best to stop the Trump march to the nomination. When we check the polls in a couple of days we’ll likely find that Trump gained a couple of points. His retort putting Romney on his knees ready to give The Donald a blow job was greeted with whoops and double-shots of whiskey by his supporters.

The “Establishment” GOP is freaking out and making a horrible mistake. They think that if they just attack Trump from every possible angle by every possible respected Republican that it will cut into his support.

They’re wrong. They could not be wronger.

Every time an “establishment” Republican goes after him his numbers go up. Each attack reinforces the image that he’s the heroic outsider. Trump’s people HATE the Establishment so each assault only helps him.

How do you cut him down? Swiftboat him. Get a group of respected developers who had dealings with him, construction contractors, casino moguls, union leaders who have worked with him. Most of these people hate him — for very good reasons.

So, have them slam him for his unethical business practices, his failure to fulfill contracts, his reneging on deals, his use of illegal workers, his bankruptcies, his phony university, his cheating on his taxes.

Have all this come from the people with whom he’s worked — NOT politicians, NOT pundits, NOT university types.

He can’t attack back at these folks because they’re not establishment. They’re the people that Trump’s always said love him. Show everyone that they don’t. And they don’t.

And hearken back to how well this strategy worked against Kerry. It’s ugly but this election is the ugliest in memory. This prick has to be stopped and this is the only strategy that can work.

Scalia

There has been much praise of Justice Scalia. I cannot recall such an outpouring of commentary, affection and praise (with a few dissenting voices) for a deceased Supreme Court Justice. All of it, from the left and right, is accompanied by a chant-like chorus of acknowledgment of his brilliance.

I’m not so sure. My view of Scalia, formed entirely by non-judicial reflection on his career, is considerably less admiring. He was smart, could frame arguments with the best of them and had a quick and often acerbic wit. His personal charm was legendary and led to the unlikely friendship with his judicial polar opposite, Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

Scalia championed a judicial core principle dubbed “Originalism” where the textual meaning of a statute or the Constitution was the final arbiter. His key point of leverage was that there was no other objective basis for determining whether a law or a case had been decided properly. As he argued, all other forms of legal interpretation were clouded by other meanings that were inserted, developed or had evolved since the original document or decision. Hence, they could not function as forming the foundation for law.

Well, this sounds good but, in my mind — honed by a half-century of studying cognitive psychology — is not only naive but it’s just empty rhetoric. The original meanings of the words and clauses of the Constitution are long gone. Languages change, meanings shift, culture drifts. There are, there must be, many circumstances where it simply isn’t possible to ascertain what the framers meant and, even if we could, those meanings would often be rendered either moot or nonsensical in today’s world. The idea of a “dead Constitution” (one of Scalia’s favorite phrases) is connotatively empty. Take three (in)famous cases.

It is just bizarre to think that the 1st Amendment which states that Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech could apply to a corporation. Corporations don’t speak. Corporations aren’t individuals, nor are unions. Nothing in the amendment pertains to collectives.

The notion that a company can refuse to provide legal and legislated services because they offend the owners’ religious views is incoherent. In Hobby Lobby, the religious Catholic owners claimed they had the right to deny medical coverage for birth control. Scalia concurred. I do wonder … suppose the case had been brought by a company owned by devout Muslims who claimed they had the right to refuse service to women who entered their establishment without being accompanied by a man or Fundamentalist Mormons who cling to the doctrine that those of African descent are inherently inferior and can be refused services?

A militia was, particularly in 1791 when the Bill of Rights became part of the Constitution, a group of individuals whose function was the protection of the state from incursions. But, in Heller, Scalia argued that somehow this collective’s rights were transferred to individuals and they didn’t even have to be members of a militia. In fact, a militia didn’t even have to exist.

These are just three of Scalia’s more outrageous decisions and, of course, are among the more sensational. It turns out that my untrained outrage is shared — and by, of all people, Richard A. Posner.

In 2012 Posner wrote an insightful review of Reading Law: The Interpretation of Legal Texts which Scalia co-authored with legal authority Bryan Garner. The hefty volume was considered to be Scalia’s magnum opus, his final exegesis outlining, defending and clarifying his Originalism and detailing how it guided his legal career.

Posner is no flaming liberal. He was appointed to the Federal Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit by Ronald Reagan. He is considered to be among the most respected conservative judges, though there’s a a bit of Libertarian in him. He is also one of the country’s most prolific legal scholars and is, according to his biography, the single-most cited jurist.

Posner trashed Reading Law. Just took it apart, page by page, argument by argument, position by position. What he found was damning. Scalia’s scholarship was shoddy, poorly developed and relied in most cases on cherry-picking the parts of decisions he was using to support his Originalism. The full review is long and thorough but it’s pretty much summed up in this short paragraph:

“A problem that undermines their entire approach is the authors’ lack of a consistent commitment to textual originalism. They endorse fifty-seven “canons of construction,” or interpretive principles, and in their variety and frequent ambiguity these “canons” provide them with all the room needed to generate the outcome that favors Justice Scalia’s strongly felt views on such matters as abortion, homosexuality, illegal immigration, states’ rights, the death penalty, and guns.”

And this neatly encapsulates my read on Scalia. His views on life, family, culture, society, sexuality and personhood, his deeply held beliefs about birth, death, age, race, gender — all formed before he ever even thought of studying law were the true foundations for his legal decisions.

He was a devout Catholic, a member of Opus Die. His brilliance was manifested, not by some uncanny ability to fathom the original meaning of the text of the Constitution, but by his adroitness in ferreting out ways to exploit the ambiguities inherent in it and finding clever ways to use them to arrive at the conclusions he had already reached.

It is wrong to praise him, as most have, as a conservative judge. He just may have been the most radical jurist to ever sit on the court.

More on Language Change

As we noted back in October, languages change and the drifts can be fascinating. I’ve always been intrigued by this phenomenon and first sensed how powerful it could be back in the middle 1990’s. I had written a comprehensive Dictionary of Psychology (Penguin Books, Ltd.). The 1st Edition came out in 1985. A decade later I returned to the project to produce a 2nd Edition and was struck, indeed startled, by how much the language had changed in a mere decade. It wasn’t just that new terms had been introduced and old ones dropped out, the changes were both more subtle and more dramatic. In the Preface I noted that entries that were modern and up to date a decade earlier now felt antiquated, stilted. “No one,” I wrote, “talks that way … anymore.”

And so it goes, in scientific fields, in journalism, poetry and daily speech. Change is all about us and we often don’t even realize that it’s taking place and that we are carried along unwittingly. Here are some more mutations in modern English that I find intriguing:

Adjectives used as adverbs: This syntactic switch isn’t new but has, in recent years, become so common that it’s almost the norm. We say “the sun shinned bright upon the sand,” or “Kathy, come here, quick,” when, properly, the sun’s shining should be “brightly” and the movement made “quickly.” This one’s not recent. In Macbeth, Shakespeare’s king “raged more fierce.” This stripping away of the “-ly” suffix that marks an adverb is part of the “shorten when frequent” rule and doesn’t occur with infrequent adverbs. “Inconveniently” and “comparatively” are never shown of their suffixes.

The departure of the adverb is more general, for example “good” and “well.” “Good” is an adjective and traditionally modifies a noun. “Well” is an adverb and, as befits the “-verb” part of “adverb,” used to modify verbs. But that’s changing and has been for some time. We often hear someone say “he’s playing good these days,” where “good” has taken over from “well.”

Other linguistic losses are occurring in the world of the singular noun: “phenomenon” is disappearing, going the same route as “datum,” “criterion” and “medium.” As noted last October, the plural form is taking over, treated as though it were the singular and has become a mass noun. “The media is in agreement” is common; “the media are in agreement” rare. This shift appears centered on nouns with Latin or Greek roots and an atypical plural form. It may turn to be a general rule that the plural form pushes out the singular in these kinds of shifts.

“Decimate” is a neat word that’s undergone a series of expansions of its denotation. It started out as referring to a punishment inflicted on an army by the ancient Romans whereby one of every ten soldiers was killed. It then expanded to refer, not just to this draconian means of discipline, but to the loss of one-tenth of one’s forces by any means. The next generalization was to expand the reference to the loss of a minor proportion of resources, not just soldiers. Then the 1/10 element was jettisoned and any significant loss was a “decimation.” Finally, it broadened its scope so that today it’s used for any major loss of any kind in any setting.

“Troop” used to refer to a unit in the military, specifically a small formation of cavalry. As armies modernized the term came to stand for a platoon of soldiers in the infantry. Today, while still used in this general way, it is more commonly used to refer to a single soldier. News reports of a “number of troops” being sent into battle are common as are acknowledgements that “six troops died in the attack today.”

“Meme” has broadened its denotative meaning from referring to an idea or a way of behaving that spreads rapidly through a culture to essentially any idea that has caught on and spread via the Internet. The term was coined by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins as a cultural analogue to a gene and, following Darwinian principles, was viewed as undergoing slow modification over time. The new meaning has been stripped of any scientific connotations. Dawkins has fought back, arguing that this new usage should be called an “Internet meme” (he’s fighting a losing battle). Psychologist Susan Blackmore offered “teme” (the ‘t’ is for ‘technology’ — her neologism isn’t catching on either). In fact, the new meaning has taken over so thoroughly that it has a verb form. One can now “meme their favorite cat videos.”

Spelling (sometimes) follows pronunciation: “Analogue” and “catalogue” are now more often rendered as “analog” and “catalog.” I’m still waiting for “caramelize” to become “carmalize.”

That’s it for today. We’ll revisit this topic in the months to come.

Budgets, Taxes and Fairness

A Mr. Roy Merritt of Bolivar, MO posted an insightful comment in the New York Times the other day. It was offered in response to an article by Jennifer Steinhauer on Speaker Ryan’s role in the budgetary process. I don’t know how to get a hold of Mr. Merritt for formal permission but, I’m going to assume that he won’t mind my reproducing parts of what he wrote.

Mr. Merritt frames the issue of the budgetary mess in just the right way. He starts with a dead-simple fact that rarely is brought up when the issue of the size of the Federal budget is debated. The country is growing; children are born, life-span is increasing and immigrants continue to arrive. Governmental costs have to go up.

Here’s Merritt’s comment (slightly abridged):

“The Government has not grown as the Tea party would like you to believe. The deficit spending has been cut 2/3 over the term of Obama. The CBO said in 2012 that 71% of the National Debt is attributed to the tax cuts of 2003 and 24% attributed to the recession of 2008. There is not one Republican that has come forward with a budget that addresses the lack of Revenue we are suffering because of this. We cannot cut our way to solvency. Taxes are lower today than they were 50 years ago.”

Now that’s a nice summary of where the problems originated but I want to focus on that last tantalizing line.

Yes, taxes are low but only if you’re looking at Federal income taxes which are used for Federal programs, agencies and operations.

The full cost of government reaches down to the community, municipality, city, county and state levels. It includes government services like sanitation, police, courts, public works, schools, parks, recreation, roads and transportation, hospitals and clinics, fire departments and on and on and on. When the Federal government reduces its contributions to the operation of these services the financial burden falls upon local governments.

Most states have income taxes, some progressive some not so much. Interestingly the per capita tax in each state is largely independent of whether the state imposes a tax on individual income. Revenue streams have to be created and most of the taxation codes enacted are regressive in nature.

The most common are sales taxes and property taxes. When these do not generate sufficient revenue, nuisance taxes are imposed on things like gasoline, tobacco and liquor. Then sneaky “taxes” come in, ones that folks often don’t realize they’re paying, like higher public transportation fares, increased fees for drivers and business licenses, permitting fees for planning and construction, surcharges for water and electric hook-ups, processing fees for filing forms.

All of these hurt low income families disproportionally. If you’re earning $150,000 a year it’s not much of a hit if the state kicks up the tax on gasoline by 10¢ a gallon but if you’re barely scraping by on $22,000 it hurts. Ditto if the county boosts property taxes by .5% for a water purification program or the city raises bus fares by 25¢ a trip.

Despite the success of the Republican-lead onslaught on taxes, the actual tax burden carried by Americans hasn’t actually gone down. But it has been, disastrously, shifted to the middle and lower income groups who are now bearing far more than their fair share of the burden. They are being taxed at far greater rates than those in the upper income brackets.

The resolution to this mess is obvious. Federal taxes must be increased significantly and the tax code must be restored to its former sharply progressive structure.