[TKDietz]

Roger, no amount of government social engineering can make people care about one another. That is not the function of government. What I've seen from government is actually the opposite result. For example, the welfare type programs where we've put so many on the dole in this country actually hurt the spirit of giving in this country and have undermined organizations that had traditionally cared for the needy such as churches. If it were up to me, we'd start severely cutting down on things like SSI, H.U.D., food stamps, welfare, and that sort of thing and eventually abolish these programs if possible.

Does this mean I want children to go hungry? Absolutely not. I think if we started pulling the government out of these endeavors churches and other charitable organizations would step in and fill the void. I know I would contribute, as would most people I know. What would change is that churches and other charitable organizations would regain that position of importance in our communities. There would also be far less fraud because people would feel a lot worse about cheating local churches and community members than they would about defrauding the far away government that has money to burn. Likewise, local charities would be much better able to spot fraud on a local level.

Do you want to cut down on teen pregnancy? Stop making it such that they'll be able to receive relatively guilt free government support. Want able bodied people who now sit around and get high all the time and get in trouble while they are mooching off the government to get jobs and live like the rest of us? Cut them off. This would reduce crime and help these people and their children to learn to be contributing members of society.

Governments are inherently inefficient and prone to corruption. Government programs more often than not have unintended consequences that cause worse problems than those they set out to solve. Our government cannot fix all of our problems. This was never intended by our founding fathers who set this country up, especially with respect to our federal government, and they were right.

I don't hate liberals. But there is one thing about liberals and even many who claim to be conservatives that really bothers me, and that is this notion that government is there to fix all of our problems and this irrational belief that government is capable of accomplishing this monumental task. They aren't. They never were and they never will be. In fact they tend to make things worse and their role in society should be minimal. They should try to protect us from each other and make an effort to keep the playing field fair. But government should not be in the business of social engineering. They need to let nature run its course. Man is an amazingly innovative creature capable of adapting to changes. We don't need a government changing us or our society. Allow us the freedom to survive on our own devices and things always seem to work out. Meddle and muck things up with government programs and more and more laws and all you end up with is a dysfunctional society that can't take care of itself.

Thanks but no thanks. Keep your social engineering. Move to Canada or somewhere else and inflict it on them. Let nature run its course here and things will work out fine.

[rogerv]

I haven't said, nor do I believe that government is the answer to all our problems, and social engineering is not something restricted to government. This is something done by society when analyzing institutional performance, and seeing if our institutions are accomplishing the tasks we need them to perform, or whether we need new institutions to take over new functions or old ones no longer performed by our existing institutions.

Having said that, let me go on to disagree in part with some of what you said. Government need not be any more inefficient or corrupt than any other institution. Right now, social security administration costs come to 2% of the budget. Show me even one private insurer that has administrative overhead that low. Private industry has its own examples of corruption and inefficiency. Enron is an example of the former. Very CEO compensation irrespective of performance is another. I think we need to compare the comparable. Having said that, let me agree that there is a lot of government waste and corruption, and we ought to work to clean it up. Corrupt government does not represent the interests of those who vote, but of those who pay. This is definitely a problem we need to solve. We may never eliminate corruption entirely (perfection should not be our standard here), but there have been periods where corruption has been better and those where it has been worse. This is something we can do something about.

Now before you scale back government too much, I think you ought to think back to periods where government involvement was less. Before government got involved in workplace regulation, unions were weak, children worked sometimes 16 hour shifts, bodies were mangled in unsafe machinery, and corporations sometimes forced their workers to work in company towns, to buy from company stores, and controlled so many aspects of their lives, they were nearly slaves. Tennessee Ernie Ford's song "16 tons" gets it right: "I sold my soul to the company store." Before government expanded the poor laws into some form of welfare, and instituted social security, people were dying of starvation here in the United States. There were churches, there was private charity, but it wasn't enough.

You make some claims about what would happen if we cut off certain people from government support. But at least one assumptions you are making is that these people are not working already. In many cases they are working, and are not making enough to make ends meet. They are working part time minimum wage jobs, no benefits, and simply are not making enough. If you simply stop the payments, what will happen?

Suppose you worked in a hospital. You see all these patients on ventilators, and create a theory: these people are lazy, and they don't have to breathe on their own because the hospital machines are doing it for them. I'll bet if we turned off these machines, we'd force these people to breathe on their own. Suppose that was your theory. Do you think anybody in the hospital would be willing to let you bet the life of those patients that you are right?

Now let me tell you what they actually do in those hospitals. They reduce the ventilator load or turn it off briefly, and see if the patient can breathe on their own, or can breathe on a lower setting. If not, they restore the ventilator immediately. It is a sensible practice. No one wants people to be on ventilators when they don't need to be. And some people can be gradually weaned off of them. Some cannot. Some need some support but can be left to breathe on their own with assistance.

I'd be in favor of making some distinctions here. I am not in favor of cutting off people's lifeline (income assistance here) until they are in a position to get something better and don't need the assistance any more.