Thing #1: A couple of weeks ago, I was in my car and the local radio news lady was doing a story on the economy. I was half listening until I pulled into the driveway, and then she said, “Experts say that the last year the American dollar was worth exactly one dollar was 1967.”
WHAT???
I remember very clearly sitting in my high school Econ class right about 1967 and then the teacher was saying the last year a dollar was worth exactly one dollar was 1946. In 1967, my teacher said, it was worth 33 cents.
The reason I remember this is that it was the first time I’d learned anything about the value of money, and I thought the whole concept was insane. I think the seeds of capitalism and conservatism were planted in me during that class. Sorta.
Anyhoo, so if a buck was a buck in ’46, and only 33 cents in ’67, how did that buck get back to being a buck in ’67 when looked at from 2010?
Thing #2: Today I was trying to explain the role of government to my minister, who like so many people of the cloth, has very little practical education. We’d been talking about socialized medicine, domestic violence, and Marxism, and she asked me what the basic bare-bones function of government is.
My thoughts are somewhat to the idea that government should protect its populace from invasion, establish a monetary currency, and beyond that I get a little foggy. Something about roads, public utilities like electricity, etc????
From that discussion, a light went on, tho. I’m thinking not many people really know today what the government is supposed to be, and that’s where the Democrats and Republicans are failing us.
Suggestions?
Ideas?
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For my part, the problem is government is not a proxy for “society”, although it is typically seen this way by “statists”. Government is an entity empowered by society to have a lawful monopoly on the use of force (at least outside very limited domains like defending one’s private property and self-defense), and to use that monopoly to gather resources from society in order to secure a limited number of useful objectives, and these limits and objectives are where politics comes in.
Statists (of the left or right) feel that a high level of government is needed for various reasons. “Social democrats” figure that because a government is democratic, its coercion is a manifestation of the popular will so it can “do more” to “help”. “Minarchists” (like me) figure that coercion is always a bad thing, even if it’s often a necessary evil, and a “helper state” tends to tyranny as the growth of a basically untouchable bureaucracy renders democratic control structures ineffective and irrelevant.
I used to think just like Foobarista. Now I say no way.
As founder Thomas Paine would say, in a democracy such as the United States, the government is the common wheel around which all our interests spin, and a process we all participate in (whether we realize it or not).
Further, because large pools of economic wealth ARE a form of coercion and control, government has an obligation to redistribute wealth in order to empower the weak and helpless against the strong.
This does not make me a “statist” it makes me a progressive, and it does not mean I desire more state “control” it means I desire less control by elites.
The more direct answer to your question, Trudy, is this: there is no ultimate rule on what the role of government is, and while there is a broad consensus on a few things there are many divergent views as well.
The “dollar was worth one dollar in 1967″ is just an arbitrary designation of 1967 as the standard for measuring the dollar’s value. They could have picked any year, why they picked 1967, I dunno.
Thomas Paine does not qualify for the honorific “founder” in my opinion. He was a rabble rouser and a propagandist who had a very important role to play in the nation’s founding, but he provided no guidance for our government’s form, function or policies. And he quickly went to France where his rhetoric escalated beyond anything that most Americans would think of as “founding principles” of this nation.
The role of government is to govern: “To make and administer the public policy and affairs of; exercise sovereign authority in.” In the simplest terms possible, the role of government is to provide the framework for which actions are deemed punishable by fines, imprisonment or death. In modern times it is considered fundamental to the role of government to provide for a national defense, but that has not always been the case. It is now so prevalent that I would consider it to be an equal part of the definition of the “role of government.”
What a society codifies into the statutes that government writes is not government, that is custom. But turning the social mores of custom into statutes which become punishable if violated is the role of government. It is a role that government frequently abuses, but it is a role nonetheless.
What is being asked here does not seem to me to be “what is the role of government?” but a more philosophical question more along the lines of “what should be the role of government?” That’s a totally different question and is at the heart of the ideological differences that go back to the dawn of civilization.
The answer to “what should be the role of government?” is pretty much exactly what leads to the creation of political parties and factions and leads to everything from barroom debate to world war.
Well while he was in France he was busy pointing out that in America–which everyone recognized him as a major part of creating–democratic government (vs. the system in France at the time) was doing great things to empower the poor and impoverished and uneducated against the power of wealthy elites and hereditary aristocrats.
That mentality rose very quickly to power in the United States with the Presidency of Andrew Jackson, which was all about empowering the everyday man against the ruling elites. And not through lassez-faire economics either, but through very direct state action. (Often corrupt action, mind you, but that’s another subject.)
As you say, there is fierce debate as to what the proper role of government is. The funny part being, for the most part, those on either side of the debate BOTH believe that they are advocating for greater freedom. Thus it isn’t a debate at all over more control vs. less control, more freedom vs. less, but rather, over, as you say, what the proper role of government is in all these questions, and what the proper policies should be.
Conservatives talk a good game about less government but when push comes to shove they’re often at the forefront of demanding more government: more cops, more prisons, a bigger military, unapologetic forwarding of American interests abroad by aggressive government action, and so on.
One of the things that bothers me about the American left is that they seem to be unable to grasp and understand conservative arguments, and answer them on their own terms, acknowledging when conservatives make a good point, acknowledging when conservatives have been vindicated on important issues, and so on. Of course, conservatives have their own failings in that regard. But if the left really wants to move forward, it needs to learn from its past mistakes, learn from conservative victories, and so on.
In the long term I think these things happen. Very few serious-minded people on the left really dispute anymore that there are substantial benefits to market competition in many, many areas. Very few conservatives really think we should abolish public education or things like Social Security (reform yes, abolish no). And so on.
One of the reasons I suppose I’m a “centrist” is because I believe that while we don’t always see it during the heated battle of today’s current debates, the democratic process we have inexorably leads to this:
Thesis->Antithesis->Synthesis.
Again we don’t always see the forest for the trees, but over the long haul the entire process gradually produces decent answers. Slowly, with backsliding, things blowing up in our faces, mistakes, setbacks, but a slow overall progress toward better.
Even today, in our terrible economic times, the truth is we’re more free and prosperous than was even close to attainable to most people 100 years ago, let alone a thousand or ten thousand years ago.
For the most part, everyone on all sides of these debates believes they are standing for freedom, the Constitution, and the principles this country was founded on, against the threatening enemy on the other side that is trying to destroy it all. Once I flashed on that, I started to chill a little on the fierce partisan debates of the day.
Dean, as you say, different people have different ideas about “freedom”. So whether we are “more free today” than 100 years ago is a purely ideological question. 100 years ago I could hunt and fish pretty much anywhere I wanted. I could carry a gun pretty much anywhere I wanted. I could even ride my horse or drive my wagon into much of the land area west of the Mississippi and simply build a cabin and become owner of a chunk of land. From that perspective modern life is chafingly constrained. However, 100 years ago a higher education was hard to attain. Most people lived hand-to-mouth in rural areas with the majority of the nation being farmers and ranchers. To travel from Washington DC to Seattle, Washington was so rare as to be virtually unheard of. Access to information was restricted both by rule and by geography.
Are we more free today? I’d say it’s debatable.
government has an obligation to redistribute wealth in order to empower the weak and helpless against the strong.
How about:
The government has the power (and uses it) to redistribute wealth from the politically weak to the politically powerful.
Some people work for a living.
Other people vote for a living.
I have chosen to reduce my income by half in order to reduce how much of the fruits of my labor are consumed by the leeches. Screw ‘em. I am not their slave.
“Dollar” originally meant a specific size of silver coin. Just about every currency called a dollar that dates back to the 19th century or earlier started out as being dollar-sized silver coins. Things get fuzzy when most countries shifted to bimetallic standards with fixed exchange ratios, then to a pure gold standard by the late 19th century. And things get fuzzier still when the dollar was devalued relative to gold during the Great Depression, and when the Bretton-Woods treaty revalued every major currency relative to the US Dollar and the US Dollar relative to gold.
What the radio program meant was that 1967 was the last year that a US Dollar represented a specific quantity of gold or silver. In 1968, our government stopped allowing other countries from redeeming dollars for gold, and the link between dollars and gold was officially repealed. However, by this time the dollar’s redemption value had drifted significantly from the value of the original silver coin, and it had been 35 years since redemption in gold was available to Americans (FDR suspended domestic redemption in 1933 and banned the private ownership of gold for investment).
Cosmic: I’ll quibble by saying I’m not sure you could have done all those things in 1910, nevertheless, broadly I’ll agree to your point that we once had more of some sorts of freedoms, like gun ownership being less restricted and it being easier to stake claim on land. Then again again, you actually would have had to go to the government to lay stake on land, and may well have wound up in legal conflict with cattlemen or thrown off your land because a railroad got Right Of Way rights through Eminent Domain, and a whole host of other nuisances.
And if course if you were not white and male, your right to stake that land claim might well have been called into question. Indeed, if you weren’t white, male, and a property owner there were all sorts of rights you might not have then that you take for granted today. Including the right to vote, the right to a public defender if accused, and a panoply of other things. Oh and your ability to get a loan would have been severely restrained and your vulnerability to predatory lending would have been much higher–indeed, much of the populist movement of the 1800s and early 1900s was all about making credit more readily available to everyday people (part of that was what William Jennings Bryan was all about with his Cross of Gold speech by the way) and creating Usury laws to restrict unreasonable interest rates and penalties.
All of which should serve to underscore that a lot of these arguments really DO go back QUITE a long way. The proper role of the state to control what and recognize what freedoms is an ongoing debate, not always easily settled.
Dishman: I am bemused by the notion that the rich are politically powerless. But anyway, personally, I don’t think most people earning more than a few hundred thousand dollars a year “earns” any of it. I believe it’s almost all luck, happenstance, sometimes some intelligence and hard work, but ultimately an amount if income that is only even possible to earn because of the social conditions that everyday people make possible. So personally, I really don’t have a problem with taxing the wealthiest segment of society more heavily. They benefit disproportionately from the entire system we’ve created and continue to sustain, and asking them to pay more for having benefited more is fine by me. You can of course disagree, but it isn’t a control issue in my view.
Government is singularly bad at “distribution”, because it ends up getting captured by the very power elites Dean doesn’t like. These elites then use government to cement themselves rent-seeking positions in society. It’s actually a very human thing: regulators are far away from Congress, but meet the “targets” of the regulations daily, so they end up getting captured by them over time, particularly if they’re big, powerful entities like Wall Street. Regulation typically entrenches existing businesses by adding barriers to entry and cementing existing business models, so big businesses typically “like” it and seek to shape it.
The bigger government is, the less democracy “matters”, and the more likely large groups of rent-seekers end up capturing the resources of the government.
I actually agree that a big weakness of the left is its fear of taking conservative arguments about the workings of government seriously. If you’re a leftie, you feel that government is “on your side” and you defend everything around it, including its obvious rent-seekers like government unions, contract legislation – particularly union-driven and “minority-owned” driven – that drives up costs and ends up creating large “rents” (meaning payments beyond market prices for goods & services) paid to politically connected contractors, etc.
My objections to big government are probably about 70% “practical” and 30% ideological. If someone came up with an efficient government that actually works for the people and not for itself, I’d probably end up being a lot more sympathetic to “progressive” arguments.
Dean,
It seems to me that you are “bemused” because you missed my point.
I’m not rich. My half income last year came to under $50k. Whether you admit it or not, you advocate my paying for other people’s lifestyles.
This is on top of ongoing “progressive” and “liberal” policies and culture that seem to consistently be aimed at removing whatever choices and succor there is in my life.
We have a term for someone who is compelled to work without choice, succor, or share in the result. That term is “slave”.
I am not a slave. I choose to exercise one of my few remaining options and minimize my contribution to your welfare state by simply not getting paid.
I am John Galt.
Dean, I don’t understand what you mean, so I have some questions.
To start with, how large does my net worth have to be to qualify as a form of coercion and control?
You want to know the purpose of Government? It is this:
The purpose of gov’t is to secure the rights of it’s people.
This is the very problem with Paine’s view. Just because the majority wants something does not mean that it is legitimate. Many of the founders expressly disparaged democracy as Mob Rule for exactly that reason.
None of this is to say that gov’t is restricted to only that one type of action. It may do more than that in much the same way that a screwdriver can be used as a chisel. But just because it *can* be used that way does not necessarily make that it’s purpose (nor necessarily the appropriate tool for the job).
> To start with, how large does my net worth have to be to qualify as a form of coercion and control?
Well, Acksiom it depends on the context. If someone offers you a trillion dollars to do something awful, that is not coercion and control. If someone bribes the President with a trillion dollars and he forces you to do something awful, that is coercion and control.
In other words, your net worth by itself can never qualify as a form of coercion and control. Dean is using ridiculous hyperbole. Large net worth is only coercion and control when it is used to corrupt the government.
Of course it is used to corrupt the government all time. Just lately it’s become obvious how Congresspeople and Senators use the large net worth of the U.S. government to corrupt each other with practically every bill they pass. This is far more frequent than via campaign contributions.
Sure, I like bratwurst, polish sausgage, italian sausage, liverwurst, hot dogs. I can’t think of a sausage I don’t like. Why do you ask?
Yours,
Tom
Yu-Ain beat me to it. The purpose of government is to secure the rights of free men. Of course, when they fail to do so, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
And before Dean gets apoplectic, prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.
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