Quote:
Originally Posted by wodin
The REAL point is, the more that Governments get involved with service, the lower the quality of that service. Do you REALLY want your health care managed by bureaucrats?
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Hmmm. That could be because of Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy, which provides: "In any bureaucracy, the people devoted to the benefit of the bureaucracy itself always get in control and those dedicated to the goals the bureaucracy is supposed to accomplish have less and less influence, and sometimes are eliminated entirely."
Not only that, but when government provides a service, it seems to drive out anyone else trying to do the same thing. Kind of a variation on Gresham's Law. For example, when government cleans the streets, no one else does. As a result, more trash seems to get onto the street, as people expect government to clean it up.
In the arena of charity, which started the thread, reports concerning the relative charitable giving of conservatives and liberals appear to show that conservatives give more to charity than liberals, primarily because liberals believe that their taxes include their charitable giving - which might be part of the reason liberals tolerate higher taxes than conservatives. And which probably accounts for the fact that our esteemed vice-president gave less than $4000 to charity,
total, over the last
ten years. Averaging under 400 bucks a year.
And now for a Book Reference: as Ebenezer Scrooge observed when the guys came around asking for donations for the indigent, "are there no poorhouses?" In other words, "hasn't government taken care of this problem?"
That strikes me as a European attitude, but, I'm afraid, more and more an American attitude. We Americans seem to be turning into a bunch of Bertie Woosters, and government is our Jeeves, choosing our clothes, arranging our lives, drawing our baths, and leaving us to make the inconsequential decision about when to squeeze our rubber ducky.