A Passion for Liberty
Tibor R. Machan @ Rational Review
Posts tagged Privatization
Column on Entitlement Foibles
Nov 10th
Entitlement Foibles
Tibor R. Machan
Gloating as they are too often wont to do, modern welfare state liberals are eager to point out that when it comes to proposing cuts in government spending, many who advocate it will not be specific. Even more telling, the liberals hold, is the fact that few if any will proclaim Social Security and Medicare a target of such cuts.
Perhaps this makes sense even when one sincerely wants the government to reduce it scope of involvement in society–to become, in short, truly limited as the American Founders wanted it to be and as, in any case, it ought to be. Let’s see.
Social security is often believed to be an insurance program, albeit one that is forced on people, yet still, the money taken for it is regarded by most who paid into it as theirs, so getting it out is naturally seen as simply having one’s funds returned in old age. Perhaps the idea of cutting social security is viewed with suspicion, as a way to rob people of what belongs to them and not as a reduction of government spending at all. Moreover, very likely few people have a clue just how the program could be removed from the government, how it might be privatized, especially after the “liberals”–it always sticks in my throat to call them that–have been working overtime demonizing privatization (even when it would only involve a relatively small percentage of the amount now taken from those who must pay into the system).
Medicare, too, has become something of a fixture and while there are pretty clear cut ways in which the free market could handle the insurance it amounts to, one can easily appreciate that few people have looked closely and hard at just how that might be done. Once people get used to being on the dole, especially for something the demagogues insist is their due by now, the very notion that they might get rid of it will strike most of them as implausible. Just float the idea of privatizing public education, or even public libraries, not to mention public parks and forests and airports! Most folks are unfamiliar with the work that has been done to show that all of this is quite feasible.
I remember when as a teen I was living in Germany where television and radio, not to mention trains and planes and virtually all other means of transport, were government run. To even suggest that this is not only economically silly but also an unjust sharing of benefits and burdens among people with very different needs and desire was met with incredulity. Surely this is to be expected of people whose ancestors were the mere subjects of various rulers, ones who rarely considered them to be self-responsible, who treated them as invalids or infants in most matters of concern.
In short, the governmental habit is difficult to shake–just like any narcotic–once one becomes acclimated to the benefits. The burdens are often hidden, or sold as part of being a citizen (or some similar ruse). And in comparison to how most people throughout the globe used to be treated by their rulers (!), the welfare state is a relatively mild oppressor. So when dismantling it is widely promoted to be cruel and nasty, the fact that doing so would be quite unusual, too, can make advocating such dismantling rather onerous, politically hazardous.
Ayn Rand once wrote a column, if I recall right, titled “It’s Earlier Than You Think,” suggesting that even Americans, with their unique and exceptional political tradition stressing individual rights, aren’t quite ready to accept the responsibility of living in a bona fide free country. They are still suffering from the illusions associated with ancient regimes and with modern statism, given how many reputable people–at colleges and universities and in the media across the land–clamor for these. (Just consider that nearly all of our educational institutions live off government!)
So it is a cheap shot to point out that critics of the bloated state do not always know quite what to say when asked for what in particular they would remove from its jurisdiction. Virtually everything, I think, can be done by people throughout the rest of society and government should only handle what the Founders said, “to secure our rights.” But this is still a revolutionary notion, not comfortable on the lips of politicians and the people considering supporting them
Column on Texas Textbook Troubles
Mar 9th
Texas Textbook Troubles
Tibor R. Machan
In my own field of work, university education, there are a great many who scoff at the idea of privatization, something that is exactly how a free society should handle all education from primary to post graduate schools. There is no excuse for government to be responsible for educating young people or anyone else for that matter. Not only is it destructive of educational impartiality to entrust schools to governments–only if there is variety can impartiality be at least approximated–but the threat of out and out indoctrination is most real when one monolithic agency, with the power to coercively collect funds for its operations and conscript its students, runs “education.”
Yes, thousands of professor and teachers want the government to be in charge but after this has been accomplished, as it has for a couple of centuries throughout America and elsewhere, there is no escaping the turf fight that takes over educational policy, especially when it comes to such courses as history, civics, and even biology and the textbooks teachers are required to use in them.
In a free and open society there will be a great variety of ways that people, even the most highly educated ones, will see the country’s history, especially when it comes to politics and economics, as well as whatever other disciplines study. Few Americans could miss the current fracas about whether, for example, the New Deal was a valuable or destructive policy of the federal government. Yes, even Prohibition, with its bloody history, has its defenders. A good many scholars and citizens in general find themselves in different camps about the civil war, so much so that there is much controversy even about whether it should have as its name “Civil War” or “The War between the States.” Innumerable other topics covered in various elementary, high school and college courses are fraught with controversies among sincere minded citizens and scholars–no one could miss the battles fought over the nature of biological evolution.
The idea that one can simply override all this with some kind of governmental policy–as it is being tried right now in Texas where there is a fight brewing among those who have their agendas concerning what should be taught to students in all sorts of subjects–is absurd. One need not be a subscriber to post-modernism–with its claim that there is no objective reality at all and the world as all in the eye of the beholder (be this in history, English literature, philosophy, or government studies)–in order to admit that there are many seriously divergent educated opinions and beliefs in what is the truth of the matter in a discipline. And in a free society the way this is supposed to be dealt with and acknowledged is by making it possible for all of them to compete in the marketplace of ideas without even a whiff of government intrusion (i.e., censorship).
No such marketplace can exist, however, if government education dominates, as it does everywhere in the country. The United States of America is practically not much different from the old Soviet Union or the current North Korea when it comes to how young people are being educated–they basically get some politically palatable stories, some banal compromises reached within the halls of government, instead of the outcome of scholarly and academic conferences where the different sides of the various controversies are presented and from which scholars return to their classrooms throughout the academic landscape and proceed to teach what they earnestly believe students should learn. What some of them will teach will dismay, even outrage, certain others; although often teachers know well and good how to give different sides a fair presentation and thus make it possible for their pupils to arrive at answers of their own.
But this cannot go on with government ordering what is to be taught and what the textbooks must contain. The wielding of political power in the field of education is no less insidious than it would be for government to run the profession of journalism, the publication of books and magazines, and so forth. None of that is acceptable in a genuine free country. Nor should government-run schools be.
