This is a post that was scheduled weeks ago and somehow, like a sock in wash cycle, disappeared only to reappear at a later date. David Brooks’ article was so good that the post is still worthwhile.
David Brooks wrote a devastating New York Times op-ed entitled The Paralysis of the State. It is must reading, especially for the liberals who believe government can do everything, and do it all better than the private sector.
Mr. Brooks is one (only one?) of the designated conservatives at the Times. True conservatives find him to be somewhat just right of center.
His piece is outstanding. While it provides no new insights that conservatives will marvel at, it is extraordinary on two grounds:
- It attacks the idea that government can do much well.
- It appears in that bastion of liberalism, the NYT.
The underlying principle in Mr. Brooks’ piece is that resources are scarce and trade-0ffs are necessary. While he never explicitly states this simplistic truth in the abstract, he provides plenty of examples. Here is one:
New Jersey can’t afford to build its tunnel, but benefits packages for the state’s employees are 41 percent more expensive than those offered by the average Fortune 500 company. These benefits costs are rising by 16 percent a year.
It is the real-life examples that make his article such a powerful indictment of the welfare state. The underlying premise of liberalism is that the production of resources is not important. They are there, assumed to be a given. It is the distribution of these resources that are matter. There are of course two flaws in this thinking:
- The production of resources is not independent of their distribution. That is, by re-distributing you alter incentives to produce and hence production itself.
- Resources are not infinite.
Liberalism ignores both of these realities. The distribution of resources clearly influences the amount of resources that will be produced. The reality of this relationship has been seen time and again in places like East Germany, the Soviet Union, North Korea, Cuba, etc.
Many of us would be happy to live with a bigger version of 1950s government: one that ran surpluses and was dexterous enough to tackle long-term problems as they arose. But we don’t have that government. We have an immobile government that is desperately overcommitted in all the wrong ways.
Thanks for this post. Brooks is exactly right in this article.
You are right that left-wing types don’t understand the necessity to produce and how redistribution affects production. Yet my experience with debating with these left-wing types is that they really view wealth as a pie to be cut up. So that if I have bigger slice it is only because I’ve defrauded the poor of their share. They see economics as a zero sum game. So they tend to view resources as limited from that point of view. What they really don’t understand is how they kill the golden goose through the expansion of government.