Manufacturing Failure

IT WAS TWENTY years ago that we learned of “A Nation at Risk.” The problems in our education system were imperiling our national future, wrote the National Commission on Excellence in Education. But since then nothing much has happened. If anything, the education system is worse. Yet the US economy has kept its place as the most productive in the world.

It’s the same with government welfare. Ten years ago the nation drastically reformed welfare, setting strict time limits for welfare recipients. Liberals fainted all over the place in Victorian hysterics, yet the welfare caseload dropped by 50 percent and the social fabric was demonstrably strengthened.

Then there is health care. We spend about 50 percent more on “bio-medicine” than our European friends, yet life expectancy in the United States is, if anything, lower.

What is going on?

Theodore Dalrymple provided the answer recently in City Journal for Winter 2007. In “How Not To Do It.” He wondered about the staggering incompetence and waste of the public service in Britain. Everywhere you looked you saw expensive failure. Yet nothing ever changed. How could such incompetence continue? What did it mean?

Surprisingly, the African nation of Tanzania provided the answer. Under the incompetent rule of Julius Nyerere, it became a country so poor that:

Nothing, not even the most basic commodity such as soap or salt, was available to the general population... But then the thought dawned on me, admittedly with embarrassing slowness, that a man who had been in power virtually unopposed for nearly a quarter of a century could not be called incompetent[.]

Dalrymple’s error was in supposing that “competence” meant actually improving the lives of the people. Not at all. A competent ruler is the one who manages to stay in power.

The simplest way to stay in power has always been to operate a top-down patronage system that distributes jobs and pensions in return for grateful votes. But the welfare state has an additional element. From the bottom up it supplies the failure and helplessness that creates the moral imperative for government expansion and the accretion of more power to the progressive class.

We could steal a page out of Noam Chomsky’s book and say that it is a system for “manufacturing failure.”

But there is an additional factor at work. It is the real stroke of genius. The major theater of operations for progressive government—health, education, and welfare—are not critical areas of national well-being. Gross, persistent, large-scale failure in these government programs will not bring down the nation.

We have had failure in education for at least a generation. What is the result? The US economy remains the most productive in the world. And the people most damaged by defective education, inner-city African Americans, continue to vote in overwhelming numbers for the welfare-state party.

We have had forty years of massive government intervention in welfare. It has utterly wasted the poor, breaking up their authentic culture and multiplying social pathology. But apart from the poor and the votes of an army of grateful social workers, nothing much has changed. The poor and the social workers continue to vote for the welfare-state party.

We spend about 15 percent of GDP on health care. It delivers millions of jobs to union nurses, nurses aides, and billions in research dollars to the universities. But the contribution of big-dollar bio-medicine to health and longevity is tenuous. As James C Riley. states in Rising Life Expectancy: A Global History,

[a] number of other countries, among them Costa Rica, Jamaica, and Cuba, reported life expectancies nearly as high as in the United States on modest investments.

But millions of people believe that a system of expensive bio-medicine controlled by the government is the very essence of a compassionate society. And every one of them votes for the welfare-state party.

It is all very well for Cal Thomas to grouse that “Democrats never have enough of our money to spend on their favorite entitlement programs -- the ones that keep them in office.” So Democrats get to buy votes with taxpayers’ money. What’s not to like?

But imagine an America in which every conservative and Republican no longer believed the Democratic mantra that a nation without government education was a Nation At Risk?

It would be an America that wasn’t quite so frightened about what the Democrats would do if we broke one of their toys.

It was Keynes who argued that the power of special interests was greatly overrated. It was ideas that mattered. “Indeed the world is ruled by little else.”

Suppose people got the idea that you could flush the average failing government program down the toilet and nobody would notice? After all, they’d say, all government programs fail; that’s how the system works. It’s all about the patronage, stupid.

Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

print view

To comment on this article at American Thinker click here.

To email the author, click here.

TAGS

Chappies

“But I saw a man yesterday who knows a fellow who had it from a chappie that said that Urquhart had been dipping himself a bit recklessly off the deep end.” —Freddy Arbuthnot
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison

Civil Society

“Civil Society”—a complex welter of intermediate institutions, including businesses, voluntary associations, educational institutions, clubs, unions, media, charities, and churches—builds, in turn, on the family, the primary instrument by which people are socialized into their culture and given the skills that allow them to live in broader society and through which the values and knowledge of that society are transmitted across the generations.
Francis Fukuyama, Trust

Hugo on Genius

“Tear down theory, poetic systems… No more rules, no more models… Genius conjures up rather than learns… ” —Victor Hugo
César Graña, Bohemian versus Bourgeois

Education

“We have met with families in which for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school.”
E. G. West, Education and the State

Faith & Purpose

“When we began first to preach these things, the people appeared as awakened from the sleep of ages—they seemed to see for the first time that they were responsible beings...”
Finke, Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990

Conversion

“When we received Christ,” Phil added, “all of a sudden we now had a rule book to go by, and when we had problems the preacher was right there to give us the answers.”
James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh

Postmodernism

A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ’merely relative’, is asking you not to believe him. So don’t.
Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy

Faith and Politics

As far as the Catholic Church is concerned, the principal focus of her interventions in the public arena is the protection and promotion of the dignity of the person, and she is thereby consciously drawing particular attention to principles which are not negotiable... [1.] protection of life in all its stages, from the first moment of conception until natural death; [2.] recognition and promotion of the natural structure of the family... [3.] the protection of the right of parents to educate their children.
Pope Benedict XVI, Speech to European Peoples Party, 2006

China and Christianity

At first, we thought [the power of the West] was because you had more powerful guns than we had. Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. Next we focused on your economic system. But in the past twenty years, we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity.
David Aikman, Jesus in Beijing

Religion, Property, and Family

But the only religions that have survived are those which support property and the family. Thus the outlook for communism, which is both anti-property and anti-family, (and also anti-religion), is not promising.
F.A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit

Conservatism

Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority — the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ‘we should...’.
Danny Kruger, On Fraternity

US Life in 1842

Families helped each other putting up homes and barns. Together, they built churches, schools, and common civic buildings. They collaborated to build roads and bridges. They took pride in being free persons, independent, and self-reliant; but the texture of their lives was cooperative and fraternal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

mysql close