Some time ago, in one of our discussions on The Open Mind, Jay Adler made the point that government should be the proper size to do its job. His point was, if I recall correctly, that the absolute size of government is not the issue but whether the government is able to do its job appropriately is the main question. My contention is that a smaller government is necessarily better than a larger government (within reason) since, as with any bureaucracy, the government develops goals and interests that are often unrelated to its nominal job. Further, the government often takes on jobs that it is simply incapable of doing successfully.
Let's follow some semi-random data points:
Child Abuse Investigations Did’t Reduce Risk, a Study Finds
Child Protective Services investigated more than three million cases of suspected child abuse in 2007, but a new study suggests that the investigations did little or nothing to improve the lives of those children.
In 1974, Congress passed the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act, designed to encourage more thorough and accurate reporting and record-keeping in child abuse cases. In New York, for example, there are now Child Protective Services offices in every county, paid for in part with federal funds.
Researchers examined the records of 595 children nationwide, all at similar high risk for maltreatment, tracking them from ages 4 to 8. During those years, Child Protective Services investigated the families of 164 of these children for suspected abuse or neglect. The scientists then interviewed all the families four years later, comparing the investigated families with the 431 families that had not been investigated.
The scientists looked at several factors: social support, family functioning, poverty, caregiver education and depressive symptoms, and child anxiety, depression and aggressive behavior — all known to increase the risk for abuse or neglect. But they were unable to find any differences in the investigated families compared with the uninvestigated in any of these dimensions, except that maternal depressive symptoms were worse in households that had been visited.
The problem here is that short of an acute situation of a child injured by an adult in the home, or adult drug/alcohol abuse which is manifest, there is usually no clear evidence that a parent is a danger to a child. Everyone denies everything and with no evidence, taking children away in such circumstances would expose many more children to trauma than would be saved. CPS, the Government agency tasked with preventing child abuse simply is incapable of doing the job it is tasked to do. The only way government can protect all vulnerable children would be to have a third party in the home 24/7. There may be some who would argue that that would lead to an appropriately enlarged government, but the typical solution to government failure, ie more money and manpower, will never solve the problem in any realistic world that we live in.
Coyote blog offers the classic example of government growing to do a job it is incapable of doing. He has nice graphs in Government: The Solution to Failed Programs is to Double Their Size.
Eric, at Classical Values, has been discussing the War on Drugs for quite some time. No one will be surprised to learn that the expenditure of vast amounts of money and the ever expanding size and scope of government engendered by the War have not noticeably worked to reduce the influence and reach of the Drug Cartels. The War has impinged on our freedoms, but that is just inevitable collateral damage, right?
Protect us from the toxins we consume -- and the toxins we emit!
My earlier post about big government's systematic elimination of large denomination currency -- ostensibly to fight the war on drugs -- made me wonder whether big government's need for the war on drugs is based not so much on a realistic goal or genuine desire to eliminate illegal drugs so much as it is the need for a contrivance. The drug war rationale thus becomes a pretext to trick citizens into supporting measures they would not otherwise support. Because people don't want to give up their freedom lightly, they have to be provided with a plausible rationale. Citizens instinctively and rightly don't want the government to be able to rifle through their financial or medical records (or bodily fluids) but if they are told it's to fight the war on drugs, or money laundering, they're more likely to be pliant. Citizens are willing to give up substantial amounts of their freedom if they think it's for a "good" cause.
In that respect, I wonder whether the mechanism at work in the Drug War is similar to the mechanism being deployed in the Carbon War (war against Anthropogenic Global Warming). Whether you agree with the principle involved in the former (saving society from people with destructive drug appetites), or the latter (saving the planet from people with destructive carbon appetites), my suspicion is that the stated goals in both cases are not only unachievable, but are not the real goal, which is simply to have as much state control over the lives of citizens as possible, as well as a rationalization for taking ever more. In this respect, the fact that existing controls are "not working" becomes an argument for increasing them.
So, to those in control, it does not matter whether the measures work or the stated goals are achievable.
It is better that they are not!
To those who rule, the issue is not whether the draconian measures involving substantial losses of citizens freedom are "worth the price," for they operate under a very different pricing scheme -- one which is geared towards taking away freedom. Debates over whether the restrictions are "worth it" are off the mark, and help rationalize existing losses of freedom as well as further losses of freedom, for they validate the statist position that the government has the right to take away freedom in the name of protecting people from harming either their bodies or the planet.
Has the drug war "worked"? This question has been asked a million times, and the proponents simply assert over and over again that if it has, it must be continued, and if it hasn't, it must be stepped up. Evidence that drug use has gone down means that this is no time to let down our guard and our efforts should be increased. And, of course, evidence that drug use has gone up means that we have to redouble lest the war on drugs be "lost."
The common denominator is that government takes on a job which cannot be done and then when it inevitably fails, its only response, the only response a bureaucracy knows, is to get bigger and absorb more resources trying to square the circle.
Finally, as bad as it is that our ever growing government can't do the jobs it takes on, in many cases it actively works in ways antagonistic to our best interests:
A Review of Sarcopenia Research
With advancing age, muscles weaken and lose mass. This makes it harder for older people to gain the benefits of exercise, and eventually it leads to frailty. This process of degeneration was given the name sarcopenia some twenty years ago, and efforts have been underway for some years to have the FDA recognize it as a disease rather than "a normal part of aging." Until the FDA does so, there is no way to raise significant funds for research and development, or make the results of what research has taken place commercially available. It's a sad and sick society we live in, wherein the people at the cutting edge of research - those who know best what needs to be done - must bow and scrape for years so that unelected, unaccountable, ignorant bureaucrats will deign to permit work to proceed.
...
As a researcher noted a while ago:
[When] I was heading aging at Glaxo Smith Kline, the issues that I faced were that I was very interested in developing medications for frailty and weakness in muscle for when people get old because when people get weak they usually stop eating and then they fall and break a hip and end up in the hospital and die potentially, but the regulatory apparatus isn’t there yet. Sarcopenia isn’t recognized as an official disease by the FDA, so the pathway to get drugs approved for frailty and to get more people mobile and into society is just not there.
There's something very wrong with the picture of medical research in this day and age, and that has everything to do with the unchecked growth of government.
I have my doubts that the process of bureaucratic sclerosis can be reversed; if it is not reversed, we will soon find the entire regulatory state grinding to a halt as more and more rules and regulations administered by more and more bureaucrats prevents anyone from doing anything.
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