Sunday, October 01, 2006

I Know How To Spend My Money

From CafeHayek.com:

"The government has the Sidam touch--it ruins everything it touches, increasing the demand for more government unless we realize the true source of the problem. Remember Milton Friedman's insight, one of his deepest:


And that is the fallacy -- this is at the bottom of it -- the fallacy that it is feasible and possible to do good with other people's money. Now, you see that fallacy -- that view -- has two flaws. If I want to do good with other people's money I'd first have to take it away from them. That means that the welfare state philosophy of doing good with other people's money, at its very bottom, is a philosophy of violence and coercion. It's against freedom, because I have to use force to get the money. In the second place, very few people spend other people's money as carefully as they spend their own. Let me take this down to the situation of New York City right now. About six or seven or eight years ago -- I've forgotten when it was -- John Kenneth Galbraith, in an article he wrote in The New York Times Magazine Section, said, there are no problems in New York City that would not be solved if the New York City budget were twice what it is now. Now, the New York City budget has since then something like tripled. And all the problems are worse. Why? Because the fact is, it's a confusion to identify the City with the people. The New York City's budget is higher, but that means that the people of New York have less to spend. It's only been transferred from people individually to the City. Now, who spends the money more carefully -- the City civil servants or people who are spending their own money? Now, of course, you may say to me, but when the City spends the money, it'll go for the good things, and so even half of it is wasted, it's better off. But that's nonsense. City civil servants and others are just like the rest of us. We're all of us interested in pursuing our own objectives. The label again on the bottle may be welfare or health or education. But you have to look at all of the places where it drops off en route to going there. There are lots of other things that can be accomplished under those titles, and the fact is that no more -- no larger a fraction of the money the City spends goes to good things. Let me illustrate in a very concrete way. A major problem in New York City is housing. Why? Because of bad governmental policy. Rent control, which was continued in New York after World War II, and the only city in the country where it was continued, everywhere else it was dropped. It has caused enormous abandonment of houses, eroding the tax base, public housing, governmental subsidy to housing, so that people who occupy it have no incentive to maintain it. If you had eliminated the government from the housing market and left that money in the hands of the people themselves, the housing situation in New York today would be far better than it is. "

The major ideological conflict that faces every generation is the collective versus the individual. Unfortunately very few intellectuals want to attack this conflict to find a resolution.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

What the hell does "Few intellectuals want to find a resolution" mean?

This is a question like 'what's the difference in perfect and more perfect'. There's a reason you think few tackle this subject. It's already been done. Why should we revisit it? So we can rewrite the constitution so that nobody has any rights and just "see what happens"?

If there is resolution to the issue of the collective vs the individual, then there is no individual.

What is the meaning of is?

GGM

Anonymous said...

What the hell does "Few intellectuals want to find a resolution" mean?

Your last comments are like asking 'what's the difference in perfect and more perfect'. There's a reason you think few tackle this subject. It's already been done. Why should we revisit it? So we can rewrite the constitution so that nobody has any rights and just "see what happens"?

If there is resolution to the issue of the collective vs the individual, then there is no individual.

What is the meaning of is?

GGM

Wannabe Bastiat said...

It is a poorly written sentence and a poorly thought out idea.

But what I think I was tryinig to say is that most assume government is given. You can really see this in developing countries. Students (intellectuals) do not go back and become part of government. They become bureaucrats. Economists do not become politicians. Constitutional amendments are rare. Many individuals never question taxes or the way they are collected.

Where in the constitution does it say government has the right to define marriage? Why is no one saying marriage is a private decision that has no public role? Marriage is a religious construct. Don't we have freedom of religion?

My problem is no one at this university is willing to ask the question, "should we receive state money?"

I do not think anyone at this university is critically looking at the relationship between government and the people who elects them. And I think this is an important question.

This isn't a good reply.