Commentary
Let me acknowledge to my libertarian friends that the title of this article makes a debatable concession in that it implies that some government policies are productive. Other readers of this newspaper may find the common libertarian assertion that “Everything the government touches turns to garbage” too cynical.
In this article, I’m not going to make any absolute pronouncements about government competence or lack thereof. I have written before that blind faith in government competence is one of the meta-errors of progressivism. I’ve also written about the inherent deficiencies of the bureaucratic model that dominates American government—defects that Ludwig von Mises so masterfully explained in his 1944 book, “Bureaucracy.”
Suffice it to say that government performance often falls short of expectations. What follows are several examples of egregiously absurd, you-gotta-be-kidding-me, shoot-yourself-in-the-foot government policies—truly astounding misuses of taxpayer dollars that no rational mind can defend or justify. I’m not talking here about the “small potatoes” of silly government expenditures, like the “$518,000 in federal grants to study how cocaine affects the sexual behavior of Japanese quails,” but truly large-scale counterproductive spending.
Exhibit A: How Uncle Sam Is Undercutting Social Security
Demagogues on both sides of the political aisle excoriate any political figure who talks about reforming Social Security. Indeed, during the recent debt ceiling negotiations, both parties hasted to assure American voters that any possible tweak, however, minor, to the Social Security System was off the table.The problem is that the arithmetical truth about Social Security is unarguable: The current ongoing pattern of Social Security disbursements exceeding the funds coming into the system needs to be remedied if there’s to be any chance of avoiding cuts in benefits or increases in Social Security taxes (euphemistically termed “contributions”) within a decade.
One obvious way to increase Social Security revenues would be to have more people working and paying into the system. To their credit, in the debt ceiling talks, Republicans pushed for requirements that able-bodied adults do a certain amount of work in order to receive food stamps and other government benefits. Democrats, by contrast, took the position that people able to work shouldn’t have to work in order to receive government welfare benefits.
According to economist and former chair of the Senate Banking Committee Phil Gramm and co-author Mike Solon, an experienced government policy wonk, “Since 1967, average inflation-adjusted transfer payments to low-income households—the bottom 20%—have grown from $9,677 to $45,389. During that same period, the percentage of prime working-age adults in the bottom 20% of income earners who actually worked collapsed from 68% to 36%.”
According to the Foundation for Government Accountability, as reported by Forbes, “among the four million able-bodied adults without dependents on food stamps, three in four don’t work at all. Fewer than 3% work full-time.”
In other words, federal policy has succeeded in spending trillions of dollars over the years to enable millions of people not to work. At a time of acute need for additional revenues to keep the Social Security System on a sustainable financial footing, paying Americans not to work is unconscionably stupid.
Exhibit B: How Not to Go About Recruitment for the Armed Forces
Just as the Social Security System is short on revenue, the military forces of the United States have been running short on enlisted personnel. According to Military Times, “The Army, Navy and Air Force are preparing to miss their recruiting goals by thousands this year,” with “The Army ... projecting the largest shortfall of all, as it did last year.”
What can our military recruiters do to boost enlistment? I would suggest that they start by stopping doing things that repel prospective volunteers. In fact, the Pentagon should take a lesson from Anheuser-Busch InBev, which alienated a significant portion of its clientele by adopting a promotion for its Bud Light product line that offended the values of its customers. In the case of Bud Light, the beer company injected a transgender message. Millions of consumers found this off-putting. While the vast majority of Americans are willing to mind their own business and let individuals surgically alter their bodies if they want to, they reject any attempt to portray such activity as normal or mainstream.The Pentagon has goofed up more than the Bud Light people. Not only have they employed a drag queen to attract young Americans to enlist, but Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin has championed Pride month, explicitly commending the homosexuals/transexuals who (allegedly) have fought in every war since our country’s founding.
Then there’s the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Mark Milley, who has defended teaching our military personnel racially divisive critical race theory while proclaiming he wants to get a better understanding of the elusive bugaboo “white rage.” Meanwhile, Gen. Charles Q. Brown, Jr., the newly appointed next Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, adopted a quota system when he headed the Air Force by which he wants to reduce the percentage of white male pilots in the Air Force from the 86 percent that they were in 2020 to 43 percent. The unspoken message: White males need not apply, because we already have too many of you. And then they wonder why they’re having trouble meeting their recruitment goals.
The main problem with adopting various “woke” dogmas is that “wokeness” depicts the United States as not a very nice place and even claims that it’s morally deficient. Such messages aren’t very helpful for inspiring love for country and building up the spirit of patriotism that makes young people proud to put on a military uniform to serve the USA. It’s difficult to think of a more inept, inapt approach to recruiting young Americans to serve in our military forces than adopting wokeness.
Exhibit C: The Ungreenness of ‘Green’ Policies
Where to begin? Save the whales? That was wildly popular 50 years ago. Now, in the name of going green, President Joe Biden and the progressive/socialist/green Democratic Party have abandoned the whales. Windmills are decimating whale populations off the Atlantic coast, yet most greens don’t utter a peep of protest. To them, the alleged moral superiority of intermittent (i.e., renewable) energy sources trumps other environmental concerns.Greens used to go berserk if a private business accidentally killed birds. I recall one case several decades ago where the federal government fined a mining company half a million dollars because 25 birds died at the mine site. Now that windmills are slicing and dicing hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of birds and bats each year while solar panels are incinerating who-knows-how-many more. Some bird species are even facing possible extinction, yet government concern for winged wildlife has virtually vanished.
Air pollution? Greens in government have campaigned for years against pollutants that may or may not aggravate asthma, but they don’t appear to be concerned at all about the epidemic of valley fever suffered by workers who install solar panels in deserts.
Potable water is arguably the most precious natural resource on Earth, and it used to be that genuine greens favored conserving the supply of it, but in the race to cover large swaths of desert in solar panels, the Bureau of Land Management appears quite eager to deplete precious aquifers. (See this report from The Epoch Times for details about the loss of air quality and groundwater.)
Then there’s the issue of hazardous waste. According to a study by Environmental Progress, during solar panels’ lifecycles, they produce about “300 times more toxic waste per unit of energy than do nuclear power plants.”
The anti-green effects of Team Green’s “Green New Deal” agenda are more extensive than those that have been mentioned in this brief space.
Hopefully, the examples in this article of your tax dollars at work in counterproductive ways, wasting billions if not trillions of dollars in the process, will disabuse idealists of any lingering notion they have about “enlightened” government leading us into a grand new future. The reality is that the right hand often works at cross-purposes to the left hand, and neither hand is very coordinated. Like the proverbial joke about it feeling a lot better when one stops banging one’s head against a wall, we will truly be a more prosperous society if we can find a way to rein in counterproductive government spending.
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
