Sultan Knish
The modern West has some of the most inefficient governments in human
history which are obsessed with making things more efficient. Along with
the inefficiently efficient machine, we also have two crises. One real
one and one imaginary. The crisis of government growth and the crisis of
global warming. Governments insist that we must adopt austerity to cope
with the imaginary crisis of global warming, while reform advocates
demand that governments adopt austerity to cope with the tremendous
piles of debt and unsustainable spending.
It's a basic power struggle over whether the government will starve the
people or the people will starve the government. Like most political
power struggles it begins with a crisis and a program for resolving it
by transferring power. Depending on which crisis and which program wins
the day, there will either be a massive transfer of power from the
government to the people or an equally massive transfer from the people
to the government.
Determining the locus of the crisis will also determine which way the
power will shift. Are we the irresponsible ones for not biking to work
or are they the irresponsible ones for running up a fifteen trillion
dollar deficit? Are we the irresponsible ones for not skipping desert or
are they the irresponsible ones for demanding totalitarian power over
us? Are we destroying the planet or are they destroying the country?
The fundamental split between the Right and the Left in America and
Europe now rests on austerity. The Right wants government austerity
while the Left wants austerity for everyone else. Austerity is a form of
efficiency, accommodating output levels to input levels for government,
a heresy on the Left which believes in unlimited government growth and
spending at everyone else's expense. That means austerity for the rest
of us in the form of more taxes, higher costs and assorted restrictions
that make it cheaper for government to manage our lives.
The tug of war is over whether governments will impose austerity on us
or whether we will impose it on them. Whether we will force governments
to run more efficiently or whether they will force us onto a treadmill
to cut health-care costs, whether they will drive us into cities to make
delivering services to us easier and whether they will continue raising
the price of gasoline to force us into their light-rail system.
Liberals have embraced locally-grown food, but not locally-managed
government. They eat eggs from four miles away but insist on
central governments in Brussels and D.C. invested with unlimited power.
Their drive for energy efficiency is equally centralized and equally
inefficient, depending on massive subsidies to develop the
next-generation technologies that never seem to materialize, never seem
ready
for prime time and whose energy savings don't reward the cost of
developing and implementing them.
Regulating everyone's energy efficiency, from the producers to the
consumers, imposes a universal austerity on the people, but not on the
regulators. In a regulator state, the only truly vital work is carried
out by the regulators, who already embody efficiency by making everyone
else efficient.
Governments impose energy efficiency by raising the cost of energy. Then
they blame private businesses for the high costs and impose new
regulations which raise the costs even further thereby creating an
outcry which leads to more regulations. The cycle ends when all the
means of energy production are nationalized or so thoroughly regulated
that they fully meet all environmental specifications, at which point
the public is told by the media that the high energy costs are for their
own good and they need to stop being such babies about it.
Despite all the ambitious efforts to reduce everything from skyscraper
construction to a human breath to a number and to impose penalties
accordingly so as to nudge the offenders away from their carbon crimes,
the real criminals fly off someplace warm by the thousands to discuss
the need to use less fuel and be more energy efficient. The resort
conferences are only a drop in the ocean of government which is swiftly
flooding everything in sight.
Environmentalism's sham efficiency is in service to a sham crisis. The
advantage of a sham crisis is that it can be unlimited in scope. The
greater the crisis, the greater the scope of the powers that are
necessary to combat it. A global crisis leads to global powers and
global responsibility for all people. And with a sham crisis, the
measures taken to avert it are as much of a sham as the crisis itself.
They are not meant to resolve a crisis that does not exist, but to
increase the power of the government.
The regulators cannot regulate their own efficiency, yet they insist on
regulating ours. They waste by the truckload and while hectoring us
ceaselessly about waste. They erect government buildings where the lights burn all night,
yet begrudge us an extra kilowatt on the side. They cannot live within
their means, yet they insist that we live within theirs. That we not
only pay their bills, but that we make do with less for ourselves.
The inefficient cannot create efficiency. The United States and the
European Union cannot bring efficiency to their own finances. And part
of their waste involves imposing efficiency programs on us. The
efficiency programs are themselves waste and worsen the crisis. Garbage
in and garbage out defines the process. The government throws money and
resources into making the outside world efficient, when the outside
world is already more efficient than it is. The sole outcome is to bring
down the efficiency of the real world closer to government standards.
Governments suffer from grandiosity. They think that they can fix
everything. Worse they believe that they should fix everything. It never
occurs to them to fix themselves except around election time. When they
do recognize their own brokenness they treat it as a symptom of the
brokenness of the real world.
They conclude that the problem is not that their national health care
plans are unworkable, but that there are too many fat people in the
country. Bring down the number of fat people and there will be plenty of
money left over for everything else. Get everyone to stop smoking, get
them to eat their vegetables, floss twice a day and take the best
possible care of themselves and the cost of health care will go down.
The Soviet Union similarly concluded that the problem was not with their
collective farm system, it was with the people working on them. It
didn't matter that wheat had been grown much more plentifully and
efficiently before the rise of the red flag. It didn't matter that
regions which had once been wheat exporters were now forced to import
wheat from capitalist countries. The system was perfect, which meant
that the people had to be made perfect enough to allow it to fulfill its
potential.
This is the government's idea of efficiency, rather than improving its
approach to governing, it tries to improve the governed. The people
become factory workers laboring under the management of the government
organizers on the assembly line of the Great Society or the Great Leap
Forward. Their objective is not the practice of life, liberty and the
pursuit of happiness but a society elevated enough to be fully in sync
with the ideals and ideologies of its leaders. A populace perfectly
trained to fulfill the expectations of its leaders.
That is the essence of the power struggle. Are we being trained to serve
governments better or are we training governments to serve us better?
Every time politicians promise us better and more services, we are being
led to think that we are training them, when they are actually training
us to fill out forms, follow orders and give them money.
The dog may think that he has trained his master to throw him treats
every time he jumps into the air, because he is getting something that
he wants, but it's actually the other way around. Every election a
sizable chunk of the electorate jumps into the air begging for treats.
Then it keeps jumping through hoops once the election is over and things
go back to normal. The electorate may think that it has trained
politicians to give them what they want, but it's the politicians who
have trained voters to jump for treats and then just to jump because it
reminds who is in charge.
We are not training governments to do their job better, they are
training us. They have trained us to give up our freedoms, to follow
orders, to recite back popular opinions broadcast on their allied
communications networks, and to do what their efficiency experts tell us
to do in order to make the job of ruling us that much easier. But what
they have not done is made their own system any more efficient.
We were never the problem. Health-care is not expensive because it is
decentralized, but because it is centralized and it will only become
more expensive as more middle-men are inserted into the process to try
to make it more efficient, until they consume the bulk of the cost, even
as they are euthanizing the elderly and starving children in order to
try and cut health care costs.
Food, medicine and energy are not problems to be rationed and dispensed
cautiously to the mob. They are solutions. Their availability creates
its own efficient solutions. None of these things are broken, nor is
society broken. It is the system that hijacks control of them and drives
up the cost that is broken. It is the system which makes life onerous,
expensive and inefficient.
We are not the short in the circuit or the bump in the road. We do not
need to be made more efficient in order to fit the government's plans
for us. Governments need to be made more efficient to comply with our
plans for it.
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