Sunday, May 13, 2007
Ezra Klein supports a working government
Something that has been disappearing since the ascendency of neo-conmen, Grover Norquisling and other modern day anarchists. With the acceleration of this process by Our Dear Embattled Leader and his greedy minions, his theses become even more important.
If Congress must constantly approve high-profile emergency expenditures that funnel hundreds of billions of dollars toward Iraq, and states cannot pick up the slack, there will have to be cuts in funding for police and schools and jails and Pell Grants and the Food and Drug Administration and the National Institutes of Health and the Department of Veterans Affairs and the nation's infrastructure and all the rest. So is it any surprise that law enforcement is extending a beggar's cup to Philip Morris, public colleges are becoming less affordable and UC law schools are shilling for corporate dollars? And that it's all happening even as the globalizing economy demands ever higher skills, as ill and traumatized Iraq war veterans are going without care, as roads and schools are crumbling and myriad other minor catastrophes are underway beneath the notice of the national media but well within the range where they harm ordinary Americans.Norquisling style anarchy just doesn't work when you need to build a bridge or construct a school, but without the school and the bridge you know nothing and get nowhere.
Such unhappy outcomes are not merely morally unsettling, they're often economically inefficient. Government spending can be more than necessary, it can be desirable. It can step in, for instance, when the market fails to deliver public goods that society desires but private entities haven't figured out how to fund. (It's useful having a national military, right?) And it can use its regulatory power to ensure that competition works to increase well-being rather than to simply amp up industry profits.
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