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« on: January 14, 2025, 10:23:29 AM »
Somewhere in this California mess are insights about public services run amok.
Self described socialists like Bernie Sanders cite public services like police and fire with the implication that all goods and services should work that way. That's totally false. Delivering essential public goods evenly and fairly is not socialism.
We are/were a nation of free people making free choices, mostly able to keep the fruits of our labor. Omitting defects like slavery where we weren't a free people making free choices, we were otherwise free to choose our profession, who we buy from, who we sell to, and at what price.
We band together in communities, states and a nation for specific public goods like having a common national defense, protected borders, local law enforcement, fire department, courts to settle disputes and so on. But the 'and so on' came to be interpreted by some to mean almost everything like means of production and that's wrong. The 'public goods' portion of the economy needs to be for only the things that only government can do efficiently and where it is unworkable for people to set up their own, like police and fire.
But when we defined public good to be almost everything, the true and essential public services suffer. cf. State of California and US under recent Democrats. Police, fire, water, border and common defense are afterthoughts in their world of governing, and basic services suffer.
On the other side of demanding endless services is paying for it. For a true public good, the cost should be shared by everyone who is able. Instead we digressed down to who should pay more and penalize them until they are not inclined to keep making more, and the other half or more expect services without paying.
We need many people pulling the wagon, carrying the load, and we need fewer people riding - so that we easily pay for the truly needy. As more and more ride and fewer and fewer pull (declining private sector, full time labor participation rate), the burden overwhelms (deficits, debt, taxes, stagnation, inflation, etc) and everyone suffers.
'Socialism' (a misnomer) needs to be limited to essential public services distributed fairly and evenly, like fire protection, but is not a replacement for running the rest of a free market economy. Government's role in that is to do as little harm as possible, to tax and regulate as necessary, but not to own, run or replace the private economy. That can only end in failure.
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