Media Free Ride for Right (Left) Thinking Liberals
"When the stock market crashed, Franklin Roosevelt got on the television and didn’t just talk about the princes of greed. He said, ‘look, here’s what happened.’" Joe Biden to Katie Couric during the presidential campaign of 2008.
The stock market crash was in 1929, Roosevelt was not president until 1933 and television was still in its infancy in 1929 and there was certainly no nationwide network to go on. In spite of these ridiculous errors, Biden was allowed to get away with this while Sarah Palin was grilled relentlessly on much more arcane matters by the same, “neutral journalist”, Katie Couric. There are hundreds of examples of this. The Elite has (the Elite is a group so the verb for the singular is appropriate) a point of view, “Government must do something.” which goes on in spite of continuous failure.
from the book: Shadow Dancing on the Grave of Hope:
Politics
Politics is an entertaining form of street theater. Politicians scream at each other about things which don’t matter, spend money for programs which don’t work, take credit for things upon which they have no affect and avoid blame for things they did. All the while, they take care of their friends by giving them money and punish the rest of us by taking it away. This profession is a poor guide for choosing what works.
Solution
There are those in the social sciences who believe that more effort should be put into “selling” good programs. As with the British captains of the convict ships, only an incentive for output will produce better output. These incentives will never occur in a government situation even when they use effective programs. You can teach a monkey to dance, but once you stop throwing peanuts, he’ll go back to stealing bananas.
The ideal situation is one in which one spends one’s own money to purchase something he will use. This automatically produces an incentive structure for the provider to meet the requirements of the customer and gives the customer control over quality.
Vouchers would solve many problems in school because, while parents would be spending someone else’s money–the government voucher–they would be purchasing something for themselves. They would be careful what they purchase, and limited in what they could spend.
What do we know about progress in the social sciences? This book has outlined many programs which produce results far superior to standard polgrams and represent real progress. It is also unarguably true that the most effective programs are used very infrequently. The prime product of any government agency is spin and results in the social sciences are easy to spin. Under ineffective programs, or no programs at all, some children learn, some long-term criminals stop breaking the law, some people stop being depressed and many stop using drugs and alcohol. These “successes” are what government employees point to as evidence of effectiveness.
Cheerio and ttfn,
Grant Coulson
Cui Bono–Cherchez les Contingencies
