Okay, let's get something straight. This belief that American conservatives have that the Government is inherently bad and unable to do things well is completely stupid.
It started with Goldwater and his buddies, and reached maturity with Reagan, and is now an article of faith for millions of Republicans and libertarians. And, like so many of their articles of faith, it's completely contradicted by the evidence.
Let's see. The Manhatten Project. The Apollo Program. The Interstate Highway System. The National Park System. Absolutely none of these would have gotten done if left to the private sector; they were done and done well by the government. And the list goes on and on. In the right hands, government works.
Of course government, like any other human endeavor, depends on people. If you have bad people, you get bad government. If you have good people, you get good government. And good government gets things done.
My background is economics. I believe in markets. Markets are wonderful, powerful tools. But they are not the solution for all problems. The reason we have forty-six million people in America who get no health care until they wind up in the emergency room is that the market solution to illness is death. And, with the exception of many Republicans, we believe that allowing poor people to simply die when they get sick is unacceptable. So the market is not the answer to providing healthcare. All other industrialized nations reached that conclusion some time ago.
There are goals that we as a society want to achieve which are not financially profitable. Those goals are often best pursued by the government. Private industry would never have put a man on the moon. When staffed and run by good people, government programs are cost-effective and achieve results. The best healthcare system in the nation at the moment is run by the Veteran's Administration. It wasn't always that way, but during the nineties they finally got good people. And that's the same in the private sector and the public sector alike.
Aside from straight-up being wrong, the problem with having a crowd of people who don't believe in the ability of government to succeed is that, since despite their dislike of government they absolutely love power, sometimes they get control of the government they despise. And that's when their prophecies self-fulfil.
You know why Iraq is such a clusterfuck? Because from the moment we had control of the country we ran it incompetently. The Bush Administration was hiring twenty-somethings straight from college, often not even having completed college, passing over great numbers of professionals with decades of experience, and putting these know-nothings in charge of the country. Solely because they were ideologically pure. The Administration had a list of the best people to put in charge of reconstruction in Iraq and they deep-sixed it because none of the people listed were True Believers. Republicans, many of them, but not Bush Cultists.
That's been their M.O. the entire time they've been in office. With a few notable exceptions, every last Bush appointee has been massively, laughably underqualified, chosen purely by virtue of their eagerness to lick boot. Because these people don't believe competence matters; they despise government, and see it purely as an opportunity to garner more power and to loot the nation.
Even the Reagan administration had a belief that the Federal Government was important. That it meant something. That it ought to at least try to do a good job. But Bush appoints lickspittles with no experience whatsoever and the nation is somehow surprised when New Orleans gets no relief for a week and hundreds drown.
Perhaps the government should be smaller. Perhaps it provides too many services that we don't need it to provide. But this stupid belief that the government is merely a burden, that it doesn't provide important services, has given us an administration that believes the same, and has done serious damage to the government and to the nation. The government is important; too important for incompetence. Good government provides good results. If you don't believe that the government should be well-run, you shouldn't get involved.
- Sun Ra