Walk, Then Run

What government is for.

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266

Dear Reader (Including Louie Gohmert, who, well, I can’t even),

So, in part to atone for the utter lack of punditry in Wednesday’s … special G-File, I’m going to get to the politics stuff. But I want to start at some altitude, so, as the cat hanging from the rope says, hang in there.

In the middle of the movie Traffic, there’s an odd little riff, not even a monologue. Benicio Del Toro, a conscience-stricken Mexican police officer, meets with some American DEA agents to talk about drugs and corruption in Tijuana. Those details don’t matter, but in the middle of the conversation, in a swimming pool no less, Del Toro asks, “You like baseball?”

He continues: “We need lights for the parks so kids can play at night. So it’s safe. So they can play baseball. So they no become—everybody like baseball. Everybody likes parks.”

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  1. David Vornholt

    Democrats, because they are the Caring Party, use certain sections of the Declaration, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights as their guiding lights. So they focus on equity, equality and racism (as the great explanation for all per CRT), hence Biden is following in that path. Notice that these three documents say nothing about building infrastructure or police forces, specifically:
    from:
    https://constitutioncenter.org/interactive-constitution/white-papers/the-declaration-the-constitution-and-the-bill-of-rights
    "Most importantly, the Declaration, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights are based on the idea that all people have certain fundamental rights that governments are created to protect. Those rights include common law rights, which come from British sources like the Magna Carta, or natural rights, which, the Founders believed, came from God. The Founders believed that natural rights are inherent in all people by virtue of their being human and that certain of these rights are unalienable, meaning they cannot be surrendered to government under any circumstances."

    Republicans/Libertarians think these ideas in these three documents are intellectually interesting but at the end of the day, they just want to live their life as they choose and not have anyone to tell them what to do. They like property rights (hence you need a military and police) and someone else to pay for infrastructure (hence the need for roads, schools and utilities). But equality and equity are negatives because they imply taking things away from you. Or demonizing you (think CRT again). Hence Trump, a Libertarian at heart, sees no use for equality or equity (unless someone has cash to pay for it up front, as a sharholder).

    I think ideas from both parties have merit. Too bad we don't get politicians who can walk that line.

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    Ben Connelly

    “Even the vast majority of libertarians agree that roads should be maintained”

    Yes but by whom? George Will recounts a story in The Conservative Sensibility in which a number of students of the Chicago School of Economics sat down with a member of the British Parliament who said, “Well at least we agree that the government should own the roads,” and you could hear a pin drop when none of the libertarians in the room chimed in to agree.

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  3. A. Rose

    Amazing 👍

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    Jerry Masters

    Jonah Goldberg on government reminds me of Jacquez Barzun on public education. Both towering intellectuals argued with impeccable evidence for a return to basics. Our once proud public schools struggle because Barzun's "educationists" can't stop substituting stuff they can't and shouldn't do for stuff they can do and should. To know Barzun, start with his essays in Begin Here: The Forgotten Conditions of Teaching and Learning. Dispatch subscribers.

    Not enough people paid attention to Barzun on returning our public schools to teaching and learning. Let's hope Mr. Goldberg has better luck convincing Americans---we the self-governed---to stop voting for salesmen rather than statesmen.
    .

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    David Gottfried

    Although Goldberg is well to my right, I usually relish his pieces and his provocative commentary. I know that even though I disagree with him, he is intellectually honest.

    Until this essay. In the course of lambasting Biden, he departed from the straight and narrow. Let me be blunt: He actually uttered an untruth:

    "There was no groundswell for abandoning Afghanistan or spending trillions more on social service programs, no matter how many times Bernie Sanders and his crowd claimed otherwise"

    However, Biden is not the reason why we ran away from Afghanistan. The culprit was Trump. Trump entered into a deal that made America appear patently masochistic. Biden simply followed through on what Trump had pledged to do: Let the Taliban walk all over us.

    Second, about Goldberg's central thesis: Government must spend its time tackling quotidian and day to day fundamental problems and must shy away from ambitious, epic and grand measures to rejuvinate and repair society:

    Goldberg seems to have amnesia with respect to the second third of the twentieth century, When FDR ascended to power, in 1933, hundreds of banks were failing every week, starvation was on the rise, and NYC policemen accused law-abiding women of prostitution and then offered to drop the charges if the women would pay the cops a bribe.

    The era of big government was in the helm and American life was revivified.

    Consider How Harry Truman, who was widely expected to lose the 1948 pres. election, came from behind and scored a stunning upset:

    Harry gave them hell, saying, at the Dem Convention of 1948:

    "In 1932, agricultural production was two billion dollars. In 1947, agricultural production was 18 billion dollars, and if the Farmers don't do their duty by the Democratic party, they are the most ungrateful people I ever did see.

    And then he cited similar numbers for industrial production. After citing those numbers he once again said, "If labor doesn't do its duty by the Democratic Party, they are the most grateful people I ever did see."


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  6. Rod Bell

    Amen, amen...
    "A real return to normalcy wouldn’t just involve rejecting the nastiness and disorienting weirdness of the Trump presidency—it would involve getting back to basics. And by that I don’t just mean living within our means, though that would be nice. I mean conceiving of government as an institution that needs to do only a few things—and needs to do them well."

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    GREG BROWN

    Government differs from private enterprise (ideally) in being granted permanence, or at least a well defined term that can only be preempted if there's egregious malfeasance - even Joe Biden is still 'in business'. A corollary is that government is exempted from need to turn a profit. And these are precisely what attracts the left to government jobs. IOW, "prove it" is impossible - BY DEFINITION. They CAN'T prove it, but more importantly they don't want to. Like BTO said, "I love to work at nothing all day"

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    Rjosephpaquette

    I’m ready for either party to adopt the mantle of “good governance”. They will have my vote and support. IMHO we have all the government laws and programs we need. They just need to be executed better.

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      Narwhal

      So, we didn’t need Space Force? Or we did and that was the last thing needed?

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        Rjosephpaquette

        Honestly I’d let the Air Force continue to handle space until we actually have a force in space worthy of a new designation.

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    Michael Dan Martin

    Aim for competence. It is the only path to greatness. — Genericalman

    https://genericalman.com/2019/01/31/the-longest-journey/

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    EricRemcon@gmail

    I appreciate the call for government competence before expansion, but Back to Basics government is boring. For at least the last decade, basic is boring. No one votes for the candidate that promises to deliver the mail without having to increase the price of stamps yet again (on top of bailing out the postal pension program). No one cares that Amtrak loses billions each year while providing a service that would not be tolerated in any other developed country.

    Everyone loves SS and Medicare because they watch the checks reliably arrive thinking “there’s a government program that works”, not realizing (or ignoring) that within 10 years there will be more beneficiaries than contributors to the legal pyramid schemes, causing them to suddenly not work. I can’t explain why the majority of the public is not concerned with this. Maybe it is assumed that whoever is King at that time will mint a few $2T coins and declare problem solved? Listening to whining about insolvency is sooooo boring when you can talk about “Medicare for all” because Medicare is a program that works!

    It is much easier to be proactive and compassionate talking about reliving the burdensome debt the graduate student population (i.e., lawyers & doctors) has accrued. Why talk about the market distorting impact the federal loan guarantee programs have had on tuition and college resource allocation when you can compassionately “fix” the problem by magically wiping away debt. Much sexier. My wife and I have stupidly paid off our college loans and our house mortgage. Are we also stupid for not buying a 2nd home in preparation for the “mortgage debt forgiveness” program that will arise within the next 10 years? Should we refuse to pay for our children’s college so they can benefit from the next debt cancellation wave?

    Everyone “deserves” their free lunch and America is rich enough to deliver if only the cold hearted would stop delaying the progress. Government works! Anyone who has been to the DMV or watched the police lift fingerprints off of their vandalized vehicle while he states “10% max chance we will get a conviction” (if the police even show up for a petty vandalism event), or listens to the story of a friend processed for a rape crime being told “there is a 50,000 rape kit backlog, so don’t get your hopes up” knows that government works!

    We already have the basics handled, now we need to expand government power (spending) to the other things we “need and deserve”. Sure, the national debt is at $30T, and rolling up at least another trillion every year, but the world will never actually ask us to pay that, we are America after all – The richest, most deserving country the world has ever seen! You’ve heard of American Exceptionalism haven’t you 😉😉.


    In summary nice article Jonah, but you are shouting into the wind. The level of seriousness and community/country before ME thinking this would require vanished a long time ago (and I am including both sides in that).

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    1. Mathew A

      Excellent comment. Long term, I am 100% convinced that very high inflation is in our future as the government will try and monetize all those unfunded entitlements that we promised. Instead of doing the right thing and changing the laws to make things solvent. They will use financial repression.

      You can already see some of this as they keep changing how inflation is calculated so that the reported number comes out lower.

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      Narwhal

      The USPS pension doesn’t need to be bailed out.

      From Reason, “The USPS pension systems are about 87 percent funded, with unfunded liabilities totaling about $50 billion.”

      “The Postal Service does not need a temporary fix and influx of cash, it needs comprehensive changes that would better serve taxpayers and pay for, and protect, the benefits promised to workers.”

      https://reason.org/commentary/usps-needs-policy-change-not-a-bailout-to-fix-pension-problems-and-debt/

      USPS is a bit of a strange duck in terms of its structure. And a big part of the pension issue came about when in 2006 Congress decided the USPS pension had to be entirely pre-funded seventy-five years out based on actuarial tables. I suspect, but don’t know, this was partly due to the fact that some want to fully privatize mail delivery in the US.

      I would caution any politician who wants to fully privatize USPS. USPS has a massive union and many current and former USPS employees are veterans. (Veterans receive hiring preference) That said, it does need better management and oversight with the goal of keeping it as a government entity.

      Postal investigators are the oldest federal police force and the US constitution calls for a some form of direct federal involvement in mail delivery. History and tradition.

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