Happy New Year!
After that horrendously written article on Detroit I threw together on New Year’s Eve, I’m not going to pretend I can throw down any sort of a sustained, coherent thought - at least, not until I get some sleep this weekend. New Year’s Eve was fun, New Year’s Day was just as fun but in a different direction (Bruno’s ravioli, by the way, is a lot better than I thought it would be), but both took enough out of me where I’m not going to even attempt to get deep or thoughtful for the rest of the week.
So, some quick thoughts:
- Hot Air has picked up on Georgia’s new law that requires sex offenders (not just child molesters, mind you) to submit their online user names and passwords, which I touched on a little during a brief flirtation with lucidity here. I’m not going to dig into this again, at least not in any serious depth, except to say that it’s a lot easier to say, “My opponent is soft on child molesters!” loudly and repeatedly in a 30-second TV commercial than it is to explain an intelligent, nuanced view on individual liberties and what should actually be considered a sex crime. Worse yet, though horribly misrepresenting your opponent’s position will turn off some people, there are more than enough people who are easily swayed by scary sound bites that it more than makes up for it, which is why my one and only prediction for the future today is that it’s only a matter of time before the sex crime restrictions start getting applied to other laws - and that time is coming soon.
- Like most states, Nevada’s budget is rapidly turning into a tire fire, albeit not of Calipocalyptic proportions. Fortunately, our governor is making some sense - no new taxes (because increasing personal and business costs during an economic turn is never sound) and start cutting bone in our state programs. Unfortunately, nobody seems to be stepping up and saying what really needs to be done - we need to cut programs. It’s not enough to just cut every program to the point where none of them can accomplish anything - we’ve had plenty of that already. What we need to do is start reducing the scope of our state government, start cutting programs, and use what funds we have to fund a few things really well, or at least as well as possible under our current climate. Things like prisons, law enforcement, and, yes, even education will need to be funded adequately, at least until private alternatives can be found that can meet the needs of our citizens (and no, there are no private schools in Nevada with enough capacity to handle our current student load - at least, not yet). We can trim the budgets of prisons and law enforcement if we start exercising some sense in our judicial system, but, until the Federal Government becomes willing to scale down the Drug War rhetoric, there’s not a whole lot of local wiggle room here; consequently, until we get that wiggle room, we better be willing and capable of funding our current legal responsibilities. Past that, I’d start cutting programs that affected the fewest numbers of citizens until we had a balanced budget. I’m not specifically sure where to start today, though I’m sure others would have some pet ideas; that said, this has convinced me to start looking over Nevada’s Budget 101 manual, as well as the 2007-2009 Executive Budget. The latter has a very enlightening introduction; both of them are PDFs, though, so don’t be surprised if they take a while to load.
- There is no such thing as a free lunch. When government does something for you, you’re paying for a lot of necessary inefficiency - by its very nature, whenever a democratically elected government does something, it has to do it in a way that’s accountable to all participants in that government - even those without a vested interest and even those whose interests are contrary to the goals of that program. Guess what? People that don’t like that program will throw up as much red tape as humanly possible to make it as difficult as possible for that program to do something. Those without a vested interest either way will try to remain “neutral” and ask for as much data as possible so they can make a decision one way or another, which will increase labor costs in order to generate and provide the data in a format that everyone can use. Corporations, meanwhile, are generally more efficient - they only need to answer to their customers and, if they’re public, their shareholders, as opposed to having to meaningfully answer to people who have absolutely no interest in their product or their market. However, as part of their responsibilities to their shareholders, they have to act in a manner that’s consistent with a profit motive, and sometimes that manner can be extremely shortsighted. Neither method of providing a good, however, changes the fact that there is a floor to how little money you can spend on a good at a specific point in time. Each thing that we consume - cars, health care, food, whatever - each has a cost in labor and materials. Neither the government nor corporations can change that, though it’s fun to pretend otherwise from time to time. Government cannot change the fact that becoming a medical professional requires an immensely expensive and time-consuming education, and that anybody that works in the field will need a wage that’s sufficient to pay back their student loans and provide a lifestyle that justifies the kind of sacrifices they’ve been making. Government cannot change the fact that medical equipment, especially the state-of-the-art stuff, requires incredible costs in research, development, materials, and labor to construct. Government cannot change the fact that, if they provide health care, they will need to pay enough to pay doctors, pay for the materials the doctors are using, pay for the nurses, pay for the facilities, and pay for the bureaucratic overhead necessary to provide paychecks to the medical staff and provide enough information for everybody to determine whether or not government funds are being spent wisely. Conversely, corporations aren’t going to magically make teachers become willing to work for $15k/year or make children learn better in 45+ student classrooms, which pretty much rules out changing anything in labor or materials. Are there inefficiencies in public education? You bet - as I said, government-run programs have to be accountable to everyone, even those that wish those programs didn’t exist and even those that are gladly doing everything in their power to sabotage those programs. Is the profit motive out of control in health care? Almost certainly - but, as long as customers are willing to pay, how is that going to change?
- It feels like a lot of people are in denial about what the state of our economy will mean. See #3: There is still no free lunch. No, you will not be able to tax the rich enough to pay for everything; the rich lost a lot more money than you did when most of their paper assets disappeared, which is why your tax base got smaller in the first place. No, the house you bought in 2002 is not worth 10-20% more now than it was back then - quite the opposite, actually. No, you’re not getting a raise - if anything, your boss will want to cut your wage. Yes, you’re hurting, but so is everybody else and there isn’t a government program or a job or a product out there that will do anything about that. Guess what? We all borrowed too much and now the banks want us to start paying those loans back. That means cuts - painful cuts - and, seeing as our economy revolves around credit and transactional banking, we’re going to have to wait until we’ve paid back enough for everyone to decide that we can start loaning money again. Does it suck? Yes. Would our economy be more stable if we didn’t have transactional banking and the like? Probably - it would also be a hell of a lot less prosperous, which is why we have it in the first place. Like all transactions and trades, they only happen when both sides get something out of the deal. Transactional banking got us out of the Middle Ages, and, unless you enjoy contracting uncurable plagues and having to eat hallucinatory rye because there’s nothing else around, you should be thankful.
Okay, those thoughts weren’t that quick, but you get the idea.
Proof I've Lost It | David Colborne | 
January 2, 2009 1:50 pm
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