Economist James Kroeger's defense of "Big Government" is
absolutely brilliant. Here are some excerpts:
"...As we shall see, when voters choose to have the government provide them with those services, it is usually a decision to buy a
higher quality-of-product over the low-cost alternative (the private sector)..."
"...How so? Well, what if we were to rely on the private sector instead of the government for our highways & sewer systems? We’d find ourselves having to put up with certain “inconveniences”, like toll booths every few miles. Private sector sewerage & highway
monopolies would be no more efficient than government monopolies and
they wouldn’t have to answer to voters so we would definitely want our privately-owned highway & sewerage industries to be very
price-competitive. But in order for
that to occur, we would need to have multiple firms and parallel highways & sewer lines. This would not only result in a very inefficient use of our land resources; it would also provide us with a
quality-of-product that is far inferior to that which the public sector is currently able to provide for us..."
"...If there is a chronic problem with long wait times for government services, that means that there is a chronic problem with understaffing,
given the level of demand for services. Why are government agencies understaffed? Because they are under-funded. You can only hire additional staff if you have the funds to pay them. Ultimately, the primary blame for understaffed, “poor quality” government agencies belongs with the elected officials who appropriate funds and raise the revenue that is needed. What we have seen in the past several decades is that “anti-government” politicians have been successful in tarnishing the
quality reputation of government programs by denying them the funding that they need to provide quality services. So even though government organizations have the
potential to provide services of the highest quality to society, it is still possible for anti-government political parties to sabotage that potentiality through deliberate underfunding..."
"...Ultimately, the opponents of Big Government do not really care about the poor quality-of-product generated by government programs they have underfunded. In fact,
they like it that way because poor-quality government services are cheaper, and that means that they pay less in taxes to the government. Then, after they’ve succeeded in degrading the quality of government-provided services, they have the political opportunity to say, “Look! I told you that the government always provides lousy service compared to the private sector!” Blaming government institutionalism for the poor results that
they are responsible for, themselves, is a favorite political stratagem of anti-government zealots. A great example of this in economic history occurred during the Great Depression."
"In the mid-term elections of 1938, Republican politicians pointed out that the Roosevelt administration had failed to end the depression in spite of the dramatic increase in government spending that had occurred during the previous five years. They pointed to this ‘failure’ as evidence that increases in government spending will not fix an economy that is mired in recession. Only a few years later, the inanity of that argument was revealed. When government spending skyrocketed during World War II, the Great Depression ended almost overnight. The reason why the Great Depression dragged on as long as it did was not because fiscal stimulus initiatives failed; it was because the dedicated efforts of the Republican opposition succeeded in limiting federal government spending increases to levels that were insufficient to restore the economy to full-employment spending levels. Today, we can see clearly that it was the
Republican Party that was responsible for both the length and depth of the Great Depression."
Great, great stuff. And very
useful...
Linette
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