The Overwhelming Problem of Government

For the first two years of my education, I immersed myself in the social sciences, my first academic love. I took a few religion classes, some anthropology, lots of psychology and lots more psychology. But, as I've decided to move toward giving in and being a teacher like everyone else I know, and I can't teach psychology at the high school level, I realized I need to learn some history so I can teach that. And my adventures in history are making me face the one subject that makes my head blow off, my brain short-circuit and my stomach turn: government.

I have always avoided the subject because I hate things that have no correct answer. At least the social sciences provide multiple ways of looking at things, allowing one to choose the model that best suits the situation or person being studied. Therapy/pills either help or they don't. The question of right government is not quite so simple.

One of the many things that has come up in my study of government, from Hammurabi's Code three thousand years ago to Reagan's speaches about the free market, is the question of the proper governmental role in regulating business. Arch-conservatives espouse the free-market as the God-given miracle that will save the world and right all wrongs should it be given free reign. And the U.S.S.R. showed us that the opposite of this - total government control - is obviously flawed.

So where do we find the middle ground? I read one article, which I wish I could find now, written by a hard-core Republican about how the free-market would eliminate the need for minimum wage. His argument was that if one company paid poorly, the workers would go to another company, forcing the two companies to compete for higher wages. This is a nice idea until you realize that the rules of supply and demand do not apply to employment. Put a thousand workers in the community where the two companies together only offer five hundred jobs and the companies will start seeing how far they can lower wages. Business is for profit. Profit does not require morality or fair treatment of workers. It only requires that the customer be happy. As far as we are consumers, we can control certain things. But not every aspect of life is based on consumption. The idea that everything is governed by supply and demand may be capitalism's corresponding fallacy to Marxism's belief that class rules all. Both do have a lot to do with many aspects of life, but giving them too much weight is unrealistic if not dangerous.

I, for one, want the smallest government possible. Bureaucracy is a frightening thing that takes on a life of its own once created. That much most people can agree on. But at the same time, I think our society is greatly benefited by some government programs, for example, Health Inspection. This is a government body that "invades" the privacy of a private business and gives fines for doing things that it believes make people sick. This program is far from perfect, sometimes creates rules that are unnecessary, and cannot keep business from committing all violations. But I am willing to judge countries where chickens are beheaded on the floor in a puddle of festering blood as worse than countries that have health codes. The free market might make businesses that choose to be sanitary successful because their product would be improved, but it would not put out of business those who did not choose to be sanitary. On the contrary, the sanitary would raise their prices along with the quality of their goods and the unsanitary would be free to market to those who could not afford better: the poor.

So a complete free market is not the "answer" to the "government question." But we learned from FEMA that a poorly run burocracy poisons those it was meant to help and spends untold amounts of money doing it. Well-connected contracters made millions of dollars while people who lost everything had to get through tons of red tape just to get less money than they needed. And now they're being told to give it back because the bureaucracy didn't have the details worked out and classified them wrong.

And, while I lean toward wanting the smallest federal government possible, I have to reconcile this with the fact that I believe forced federal desegregation was an emensely positive force in American society. I truly believe that if the government had not forced it, it would not have happened in more than a few select places. But the way this was executed was often horrendous. For example, Boston bussing. One judge decided how it would work. Children from Southie were sent to Roxbury and vice versa. No one bothered West Roxbury. No one living on Beacon Hill had to worry about their children being sent far away. And the whole situation could have been dramatically improved if the proper form of government, the city's school board, had been working on the problem and laying plans for gradual change since Brown v. The Board of Education twenty years earlier. The concept of forced desegregation was entirely necessary but the government executed this in the worst possible manner.

So it seems to me we need to figure out what the bare minimum of government interference in private life is and make the government as efficient, useful and appropriate in decision making as possible. Which is nice and easy to say, but near impossible in practice. And the more I learn about the economy, different types of government and different views on the role of that government, the more overwhelming it is to figure out my own personal views of what is best. Add to this the need to implement these views and I wonder how anyone can make their mind up enough to get into politics at all.

Maybe I'll search the internet for some studies on rapid cycling bipolar disorder. It makes a whole lot more sense to me.