The Industry of Problem-Solving
“All I ever did was supply a demand that was pretty popular.”
~ Al Capone
Greetings my fellow Americans!
If there’s one thing our government has been very good at doing for at least the last 100 years, it’s growing itself to address more and more aspects of life on Earth which have been deemed to be otherwise unsatisfactorily overcome in order that “basic human rights” (whatever that can mean to 7+ billion individuals around the globe at any given moment) may be universally realized. What has also gained public prominence, especially with the declaration, and perpetuation thereof, of the COVID-19 pandemic, is that so-called private companies, and public universities, have learned how to effectively partner with government to “help” achieve this vision, in exchange for money and legal protections.
As President Ronald Reagan once famously and presciently quoted, “Government does not solve problems; it subsidizes them.” Career politicians and bureaucrats learned long ago that their livelihoods and “job security” are tied to the perceived existence of problems yet-to-be solved, not in actually solving these. Furthermore, they’ve mastered the art of inventing narratives about any number of new existential shortcomings to observe and share in the dissatisfaction and “injustice” thereof, in order that their constituents, loosely considered customers of their problem-solving prowess, remain in a state of need of their services while growing in number. The “private” partners of these public cash cows are all too willing to belly up to the bar in support of these narratives, regardless of their temerity, not only for a share of the immense amount of monies appropriated, but also to nurture and grow their own collections of perpetual customers, ethics and morals be damned.
Defense and Health Care are two of the more prominent sectors (among several others) in which multibillions, if not trillions, of dollars are spent every year, with an innumerable number of contractors, researchers, scientists, medical doctors, information technology professionals, et. al., supporting new and existing programs targeting each of the problems which have been identified at one time or another by government as needing to be “fixed.” We, so it is said, need Departments of Defense and Health and Human Services because of collective existential threats from without and within, and only under the direction of “experts” lining the halls of government can we adequately strategize on and direct the necessary resources toward commensurate solutions. And we need massive bureaucracies to support these efforts, in perpetuity, because there will always be such threats.
This sounds like a noble and admirable goal on the surface, but what happens if the “existential threats” are ever eradicated or otherwise cease to be? What becomes of the experts, bureaucrats, and partners whose sole mission and purpose has been to resolution of said defects? And what of the politicians who ran on solving these? What becomes their mantra for lifetime re-election?
While I’d truly like to find out, those people have become much to good at ensuring that any lasting cures to what ails us as a human race will never be realized. They know that as soon as demand for their services ends, so do their careers. Perceptions of long-lasting peace foment indifference to defense, sustained healthy people to “health care.” And a society generally bereft of ethics and morals rooted in belief in a supreme Creator in positions of power and authority becomes especially susceptible to, and frequent targets of, propaganda designed to perpetuate these demands.
I am under no delusion that such threats have, and will always, exist at some level in our fallen world, inhabited by fallen humans, so this is by no means a call for a complete eradication of government. However, a circumspect and exhaustive review and reform of the policies and procedures of these and all government bureaucracies is, at the very least, long overdue. I suspect that this ship has long since sailed, but I can dream, can’t I?
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Bureaucracies and the like, have to constantly find something that needs fixing, even if it doesn’t. Part of it is the budget process. It’s set up that government automatically grows, as long as the budgets are spent. We have a marking up process that does nothing, but increase. If a line manger in some agency ever submitted a budget request lower than expected,. for any reason, rest assured a politician would get him fired.
I do a lot of dreaming, also.