Do Americans Care If Policies Work Anymore?
You can have cheap, fast or good. Pick 2. If it's government, pick none.
There’s an old saying you’re supposed to keep in mind before buying something:
“You can have cheap, fast or good. Pick 2.”
As a general rule, in the private sector, this is about how it works.
It works a little differently with the government. With government, you don’t get cheap, fast, or good. In fact, typically they charge you an exorbitant amount of money via taxes to slowly do things you don’t want to be done at all. This is why the private sector does almost everything better than the government. Conservatives understand all this. Liberals? Not so much.
However, what few people of any ideology seem to have noticed is how incompetent our government has become even compared to other governments. You’d probably have to go to the Third World (well, or Greece) to find a nation run by the sort of mediocrities and sociopaths in charge in America. Look at Joe Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan. If you put together a list of the top 10 military disasters in American history, that would be on it. Similarly, we actually gave “gold medals” to the Capitol Hill police force that was overrun on Jan 6. Gold medals for what? A complete and utter failure at doing their jobs? How’s the border looking these days? Is it under control? No, it’s not. What about spending? Are the books balanced? Are Social Security and Medicare even on track to exist in their current forms in two decades? Nope. What about Obamacare? Oh yeah, every last thing Obama used to sell it to the American people turned out to be a lie.
Here's a serious question. Actually, take a moment and think about this. When’s the last time any sort of government policy that didn’t simply give you more of your own money back made your day-to-day life better? I’m not talking about a policy that you may agree with like building a wall or cutting off welfare, I’m talking about a government policy that went in place and your day-to-day life improved because of it. After thinking about it, the only thing in recent memory that seems like it could conceivably qualify would be President Trump’s Operation Warp Speed, which got a COVID-19 vaccine out faster than almost anyone thought possible. As someone who has taken the vaccine, I’d say that’s an improvement. Otherwise, I’m drawing a blank.
Some of this is a result of the natural incompetence of government, but it’s also a consequence of the fact that few people in American politics even seem to be trying to solve real-world problems anymore. On the contrary, much of what passes for government policy and activism in America today is little more than virtue signaling that’s meant to raise or lower the status of the person advocating it, not accomplish anything, or make anyone’s life better. This is a problem across the ideological spectrum, but liberalism in particular has been completely consumed by it. Like Hitler near the end of WW2, ensconced in his bunker, ordering imaginary legions into combat, liberals cavalierly demand we borrow and spend almost unfathomable sums of money ostensibly for some cause, but primarily to make themselves look good to other liberals. Alternately, those liberals compete with each other by being willing to go the furthest in advocating perfectly ridiculous positions not designed to accomplish anything other than make themselves look good to each other.
The perfect example of this is probably AOC’s Green New Deal. The cost estimates for it range between 10 trillion and 93 trillion dollars. Her staff originally put out a document that suggested we’d have to get rid of cars, airplane flights, and farting cows. Although those kinds of things are often said with complete seriousness amongst environmental extremists, the American public has no interest in those sorts of trade-offs. So, when those ideas were widely mocked, that document was pulled down and across the board on the Left, people pretended that AOC never wanted to do that in the first place. Fact check? False. The plan calls for net-zero emissions in 2050, which is impossible with the current technology we have unless we want to all go back to living like the Flintstones. It would devastate the economy, would cost far more than we can afford, and most bizarrely, even if the Green New Deal did work, it would be completely meaningless. Even if you buy into the idea that global warming is a massive problem (which is iffy) and the key to beating it is lowering manmade Co2 production (even iffier), the United States is just one nation out of the entire planet and we’re not even the top Co2 emitter. China pumps out more than twice as much Co2 as the US. So, what’s the real point? It’s to make people like AOC look like they care about the environment. That’s it.
Another great example of this is the athletes disrespecting the flag to supposedly bring attention to the tiny number of black Americans killed by the police:
For the last five years, the police have fatally shot about 1,000 civilians annually, the vast majority of whom were armed or otherwise dangerous. Black people account for about 23% of those shot and killed by police; they are about 13% of the U.S. population. ...There are about 7,300 Black homicide victims a year. The 14 unarmed victims in fatal police shootings would comprise only 0.2% of that total.
Is this a serious problem? Honestly, if you go by the numbers, pretty clearly it’s not. However, this has never been about numbers or real problems. It has been about people gaining clout. So, for example, that’s why disrespecting the flag became the standard way people chose to bring attention to this issue. The right people liked it (liberals) and it made the right people angry (conservatives). The #BlackLivesMatter movement simultaneously featured rioting, lawbreaking, and arson, much of which hurt black businesses. Meanwhile, 25 plus people were killed during the rioting. There were also calls to “defund the police.” This was particularly stupid because if you believe the police aren’t doing a good job, you need to funnel MORE money into police departments to improve training. Predictably, the cities that defunded the police almost uniformly saw increases in crime and murder which mostly impacted black Americans. So, by any reasonable measure, the #BlackLivesMatter movement has been a disaster for the country and for black Americans. However, Colin Kaepernick, Megan Rapinoe, and a few people at the top of #BlackLivesMatter got lots of attention and made money off of it, so from their perspective, it was a huge success.
There is a wonderful quote by Stephen Covey that many of us ignore to our detriment in life and in politics.
For example, if we send our military to war, the worst thing isn’t killing civilians, it’s LOSING THE WAR. In Afghanistan, we just spent trillions of dollars and lost 2,400 soldiers to replace the Taliban with the Taliban. If rent control actually kept rent prices low, why aren’t New York City and San Francisco two of the most affordable places to live in America? If the key to fixing poverty is welfare and food stamps, why do we still have poor people after spending 22 trillion dollars on anti-poverty programs? If masks and lockdowns are the key to stopping the spread of COVID-19, why didn’t those tactics seem to work ANYWHERE in 2020? If gun control is the key to stopping crime, why isn’t Chicago a crime-free utopia? If the key to making life better for Americans was more government, why isn’t our life a paradise already given that we have the most expensive government on earth? If transitioning makes people happier and healthier, why is their suicide rate 20 times higher than their comparable peers instead of LOWER? Did Obamacare work? Did people get to keep their doctors? Did prices go down? No, not at all. If San Francisco is so great at dealing with the homeless, why do they have human feces all over the streets?
How did we end up with people who simultaneously offer government as the solution to every problem and don’t care if the government solutions they’re offering up work or not? Because it’s no longer about solving problems at all, it’s about a group of people signaling their virtue to each other to try to gain status. It literally does not matter to them at all whether the policies they’re advocating work or are even sane. It matters how much praise they get for offering up the policy from the people they want to impress.
Along similar lines, have tearing down Confederate statues improved anyone’s lives? Has Critical Race Theory brought people of different races together or driven them apart? Same question about cultural “appropriation.” Does banning alternative viewpoints from college campuses help students get educated or make them less knowledgeable about the world? When people’s views are censored, isn’t that an indication that we are so sure of the right answers that there’s no need to even hear an alternative viewpoint, and hasn’t that type of thinking been shown to be wrong over and over again? When has being “woke” made any organization better?
Why do all these policies fail again and again? Because it’s about making an impression, not solving a problem. This insane way of approaching survives in large part because so many Americans have stopped asking the most basic questions about policies and legislation. Questions like:
· If we’re discussing legislation, does this have any realistic chance of happening at all?
· Where has this worked before?
· What’s the trade-off?
· What will it cost and how will we pay for it?
· What makes this better than what we’re currently doing and what makes it worse?
· What would be evidence that this policy has failed?
· Should the federal government step in on this issue at all or should it be left to the states?
· Whose lives does this make better and whose lives does it make worse?
· What are the potential dangers of doing this?
These sorts of questions should be the STARTING POINT in politics, and it doesn’t seem like we ever bother to get around to them at all anymore. Until that changes, politics in America are doomed to remain completely dysfunctional.