Failure: A Great Place to Start

A Russian emigre student, just starting here in an American school, moved in next door to me recently. Sofia and I have talked a lot in recent weeks – talked about which laundromat is actually safe, about where to find cheap groceries, about speedy driving routes – all the stuff I could naturally be expected to know a little more about. She brought up her medical career aspirations here in America and, without delay, she’s already developing opinions on the failings of American health care.

“Well, I just think that in a lot of countries, like maybe Sweden or England, the healthcare is all free and that’s the way it should be. Poor people should be able to get free medical services they need from the government is all; isn’t that fair?”

Sofia does not know me well yet.

So, what kind of an answer would you offer her? About a hundred potential fact-driven replies sprang to mind as I listened and nodded in sympathy with the poor. I could have described how healthcare is never free. I could have described how very much more expensive it all becomes when we’re all forced to maintain the medical compliance bureaucracy. I could have described how much less effective doctors have become with layers of insurance, HMO and pure government technicalities between themselves and patients. I could have made the case that it all results in inflexibility and stagnation within a system that should be exceedingly dynamic. I could have described how the simple mandates for insurance, and the insurances themselves change the market incentive structure, guaranteeing ballooning costs forever. I could have growled all this in my angry voice, making sure she didn’t get another word in!

Yet, none of this seemed appropriate in the moment, speaking to someone still rolling with medical training wheels, not to mention American government training wheels. And whatever Sofia’s level of understanding (she is a pretty smart cookie) there’s just a better place to start when confronted by people who begin sentences with, “I just think the government should do more to…”

I’d like to make the case that the right place to begin, in this and so many instances, might be with a succinct question:

“Why do you trust the government?”

I’ve never heard a straight answer to this counter-question. People normally begin to flounder or ramble in reply. It is a fine “gotcha” question if you want one but it’s ramifications are also profound and fundamental. It’s a question I would like to help lodge in people’s brains, forcing them to take it home and wrestle with it a bit.

Once someone seriously considers this question they have to start re-winding all the footage and documentation mentally available to them of government at work and, if their memory is good, this is usually a record of government in the act of failing. Alternatively, and you will encounter this, people will give you an answer pertaining to their fantasies about a Utopian government – one that achieves solutions without costs, downsides or unforeseeable consequences, one staffed by disinterested and benevolent philosopher kings.

By “failure” I mean three things at once. First, I mean something like the processes of government itself impeding good outcomes. This would come into play in the annual non-passing of a federal budget. Another form of failure is partisanship-related failures – those times the people are failed because congressmen were too busy fighting each other to get their limited jobs done. Then there are the more malevolent failings – useless but murderous wars, kickbacks of all kinds, harming children through your programs to protect children, lying to keep your humanity-ending bioweapons programs running – those types of things. And it’s possible there are other species of failure to be discovered; governments lead in innovation within this evolving field.

And, again, the history of our government at work is a litany of wide-ranging failings, though only in reference to all the things they’ve ever promised us. Here’s the starter kit to help friends and neighbors suffering from infectious Public Sector Credulity Syndrome – It’ll hold ya’ over till the PSCS vaccine…

• Government is just now wrapping up the bombing of Iran, having killed thousands of civilians, largely against the will of the American people.
  Governments not only failed to contain the spread of COVID-19, they also engaged in vigorous misdirection and defamation in defense of their roles and, incidentally, also created COVID in a lab.
• In 1935, the government instituted its own pension program we know as social security, ostensibly the holding of money from all paychecks in a pool to dispense to the elderly – an altruistic and simple proposition. This is now the largest item in our federal budget requiring about 1.6 trillion stolen, invented or borrowed dollars annually.
• Among the most fundamental real duties of our (or any) federal government is to maintain the national borders. During the Biden administration about 6.7 million (Heritage figures) people entered the country illegally, though this number is really impossible to pin down.

These are some pretty heavy-duty failings, however you define failure. If it were possible to obviate these and still cling to trust in the big brother you love, you’d still have to contend with a glut of findings emerging from the murky realm of what used to be “conspiracy theories!” For example, rational people would have a hard time ever trusting the government again if they knew that:

• First, government hides documents on its own activities constantly, at home and abroad, and when forced to release files, redacts so heavily that they are useless. The most recent large-scale instance is the Epstein files. Do they have something to hide?
• Due to disclosures long ago through the Pentagon Papers, Fletcher Prouty’s The Secret Team, etc., we know that our CIA was responsible for the Vietnam War or at least making sure American young men got sent to fight it.
• The coincidences surrounding the emergence of Lyme disease, probably around 1970, are too striking to discount easily. There was a U.S. bioweapons research station operating in the neighborhood of Lyme, Connecticut at that time, definitely working with tick-borne illnesses. Start educating yourself with Chris Newby’s Bitten (2019) if you’re among the skeptics.
• Through the Snowden disclosures, we learned that our intelligence agencies had (have?) the potential to spy on everyone all the time.

Of course, I could keep going, and going. But back to the point: There’s a fairly iron-clad case to be made, rooted in history, that government should not be trusted. To this, I would add the caveats, “ever” and “with anything,” for the sake of fairness.

About a decade ago Dr. James Payne, a liberty “influencer” from before “influencers” were a thing, coined a still very relevant word to describe the condition all too many Americans find themselves in when thinking about government. That word is “failurism”, elaborated on in Dr. Payne’s The Big Government We Love to Hate (2021). Loosely defined, failurism means that government fails fairly reliably but people still clamor for more government to solve their problems. My own follow-on thought is that people 1) like the immediacy of mandates which can magically impart solutions and 2) don’t think in terms of alternatives to government – it’s habitually a panacea for almost everything. And so, people extend their trust to government time and again though, with a little thought, they’d realize that the credibility of this institution has long since been exhausted. Dr. Payne made a career of demonstrating this.

I would say that trusting the government is like handing the keys to your home to a neighbor with questionable ethics. But it’s more like inviting into your home, to babysit your kids, a neighbor who’s tried to poison you on several occasions, peers over your hedge constantly, tinkers with your cars and appliances until they barely run, who you have personally seen kill hundreds of people with bombs, and who, when the police arrive, always lies his way out of his crimes successfully and buries evidence. But what can you say? The neighbors all around seem to love the guy.

So, yeah, it’s probably best that I didn’t shoot from the hip when Sofia suggested that maybe government should… So what did I say?

Well, I complimented her on her humility. She had ended her short speech with the phrase: “I don’t know. I’m just young still and starting school. I will learn more about your government.”

She certainly will. There’s time to work on this.