Landmark #4: Government
For the past ten pages I've been outlining what I view to be the major landmarks in the terrain of human problems. So far I've touched on population and natural resources, wealth and poverty, and the surprisingly small cost of solving many "big" problems. The last landmark I want to bring up is government.
Worldwide, the governments we've built for ourselves have become one of the most powerful human forces on the planet, second only to the collective action of individuals. Fortunately, it's widely recognized that governments wield enormous power, and a great deal of our day-to-day news involves governments and government actions. Unfortunately, on the whole, the governments of the world are doing far less than they could to address world problems. I have three general criticisms of governments -- oppression, nationalism, and waste -- each of which I'll outline separately below.
My greatest concern is over governments which intentionally oppress people, in the way so many autocratic governments seem to do. Stalin's government was a prime example -- a government that intentionally killed millions of its own citizens, tortured subversives, obstructed travel into and out of the country, and actively repressed freedom of speech, assembly, and religion. Though perhaps not as bad as Stalinist Russia, today's North Korea is another example of an unrepresentative government -- a government which simply isn't looking out for the best interests of its citizens.
Democracies tend to be far better at meeting the needs of the people, and I'm pleased to see the current world trend toward democracy. In terms of how it treats its own citizens, I believe the United States government is one of the best in the world. Our constitution is idealistic, practical and operative; our democratic process is regular and reliable; and our elected representatives are alert and responsive to the desires of their constituencies. We enjoy freedom of expression, freedom to travel, freedom to gather, freedom to practice our religions, and a host of other civil liberties.
My second general criticism is of government actions that promote nationalism, unnecessarily widening the cracks of tribalism fracturing the world's people. Like all forms of tribalism, I think nationalism arises from fundamental human nature -- an instinct to band together in the face of adversity. I consider tribalistic instincts to be comparable to other basic human instinctive reactions, like instinctive violence and instinctive sex drive. At some point all these instincts were essential to human evolution, but in civilized society they must be carefully moderated and channeled. We still have avenues of expression for violent behavior, but we also have strict laws, customs, and taboos that help to curb rape, murder, child pornography, etc.
But we have no such cultural defenses against nationalism. We routinely encourage patriotism, team spirit, and concern for the interests of our group before all others. Nationalism encourages us to look at the world as a zero sum game -- a contest in which some win and some lose, and the more they win, the more we lose. We seem to think that if the Japanese are getting richer it means we're getting poorer. Sometimes that may be true, but often life is a positive sum game in which all players grow richer together. The world today is fabulously richer than it was just a few centuries ago, and people all over the world are working hard, creating wealth. That work should be applauded and rewarded, wherever it is done.
Our governments are not responsible for creating nationalism, but they often encourage it and play off of it. At one level individual officials -- presidents, generals, and representatives -- publicly call for patriotism and represent other nations as mock adversaries. On a second level, our very system of government promotes nationalism, by making citizenship more of a birthright than a free choice, by valuing the lives of citizens more highly than non-citizens, and, through taxation, by forcing those values upon the people. We would all be better off if governments did more to promote free trade, free travel, and economic and military interdependencies. What would the world look like if our governments acted as catalysts in the global melting pot, rather than membranes?
My third criticism, and the one most pertinent to the U.S. government, is of economic waste. Large, centralized organizations are notoriously difficult to manage efficiently, and in today's economic climate monolithic organizations like GM, IBM, and the USSR are faltering, failing, dissolving, and re-forming into their smaller, more responsive, semi-autonomous components. More than anything else this represents a long overdue switch from wasteful planned economies to more efficient, regulated-market economies. Years ago someone told me that the U.S. military was the second-largest planned economy in the world, behind only the USSR. Now there is no USSR and the former Soviet states are moving to free market economies. I wonder, is the U.S. military machine, built to keep the world safe from communism, now itself the largest planned economy in the world?
Here in the U.S., the government causes economic waste in two ways -- with its taxation policies and its spending policies. I'll start with taxation. Any tax has two effects -- it generates revenue for the government and it discourages certain behavior. The Clinton administration has pushed for a BTU tax, carbon tax, or significant gas tax in an effort to reduce both pollution and excessive energy dependence. But these measures have not been popular, and currently we don't have significant pollution taxes, despite the fact that we want to discourage pollution. Instead we try to control pollution through regulation, like California's law that 10% of all corporate auto fleets must be electric within a decade. The one thing we do tax heavily is income, with capital gains tax, income tax, social security tax, etc. That's counterproductive -- we shouldn't tax income because we don't want to discourage income, and we shouldn't tax employment because we don't want to discourage employment. Income tax is beneficial because it raises revenue, but any tax raises revenue, so we might as well only tax things we want to discourage. Ideally, I'd like to live in a place that replaced income tax with taxes like carbon tax, pollution tax, heavy metals tax, land abuse tax, aquifer reduction tax, road use tax, and logging tax. In addition to systematically taxing the wrong things, current U.S. tax policy is just plain messy, with inconsistent, arbitrary policies that at times encourage businesses and individuals to arrange their affairs so as to minimize tax exposure rather than to create wealth. One thing we clearly need is a simpler tax policy.
The second way that the U.S. government causes economic waste is by allocating resources poorly. The most obvious case of this is military spending. The cold war is over, yet we still allocate over 250 billion dollars per year to military spending, several times as much as Germany, Japan, China, Iraq, Iran, Cuba, Libya, and Panama combined. The U.S. soldiers in the Gulf War were, on average, safer than if they'd stayed in the U.S., while average life expectancy for a black male born in Harlem is lower than the life expectancy of a boy born in Bangladesh, one of the very poorest countries in the world. These problems can only get worse unless we stop squandering urgently needed resources on superfluous military might.
"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed. The world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the houses of its children."
-- Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1953
"Our government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear -- kept us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervor -- with the cry of grave national emergency... Always there has been some terrible evil to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind it by furnishing the exorbitant sums demanded. Yet, in retrospect, these disasters seem never to have happened, seem never to have been quite real."
-- General Douglas MacArthur, 1957
The Bottom Line
Our governments wield enormous power -- power that both creates
and prevents human misery. We must try to govern ourselves with
less oppression, nationalism, and waste.
