from NY to Israel Sultan Reveals
The Stories Behind the News

Posted: 24 Feb 2010 08:14 PM PST

It is no news to anyone that the world can often be unfair,
that families lack the things they need and that people suffer and die
unnecessarily in ways that could be avoided. The fundamental question is
do we respond to such situations by working together on an individual and
social level, giving donations to, participating in, and creating
organizations that can help-- or do we try to solve the problem with the
white elephant government programs approach of socialism?

The government centralized approach cannot be defended on the
grounds of efficiency, because government programs are notoriously
inefficient. They cannot be defended on the grounds of fairness, as a
single giant program is far more likely to marginalize recipients with no
other recourse than a diverse variety of programs. They cannot be defended
on financial grounds, as government programs are more likely to run out of
money, and less likely to have a real plan for dealing with resource
shortfalls. And ultimately government programs draw their funding from the
very same people who fund independent programs. Yet they cannot use
that money better or more efficiently.

The only defense for
government programs is that they are comprehensive and mandatory. People
can choose whether to contribute to charity, but they cannot choose to pay
their taxes. This brings the element of wealth redistribution to the
table, transforming voluntary contributions into mandatory entitlements.
(Which this might seem like a way to maintaining funding sources, this
only works until the government itself runs out of money, which Federal
social spending programs are set to do.) But the real appeal of socialism
is its supposed comprehensiveness. Socialism for the public is supposed to
be a Fire and Forget sort of charity. Pay more taxes and the social
problems are gone... the only problem is that they are not actually
gone.

Regardless of whether government agencies or private
charities are in the works, resources are still a finite quantity. And
wealth redistribution has historically been a surefire way to kill
resource generation. Breaking the cycle of economic growth and trying to
artificially control it, produces much the same results as overfishing or
hunting the wildlife in a region too widely to allow for a natural
balance. Human endeavor, like any other natural process, renews itself
through economic processes. Excessive taxation and government intervention
break the cycle, leading to diminished resource generation and weaker
economies.

The lure of socialism is that of the golden Utopia, a
promised land in which the sun always shines, there are never any rainy
days and there's enough of everything for everyone. In real life it
doesn't work that way. Economies, like any other natural system, have
upturns and downturns. There are losses and gains. Resources are finite
and are generated through wise trade and reinvestment. In the rhetoric of
the socialist utopian though, it never has to rain, all the days can be
sunny, wealth is endless and only greed prevents it from being distributed
equally by the wise and all-knowing government bureaucracy.

The problem is that a government
bureaucracy is not any better at making decisions or distributing
resources than individuals or organizational bureaucracies. Lack of
self-interest does not lead to better decision making. Often it leads to
worse decision making, because the average employee is not going to be a
philanthropist. Government bureaucracy quickly turns into the art of
sitting in a chair and occasionally dealing with people based on
regulations drawn up by people too high up the bureaucratic food chain to
actually deal with people. The goal of those higher up on the food chain
is to either dispense a lot of services or to ration as few services as
possible, depending on the available resources. The goal of those sitting
in the chair is to get through the day with as little work as possible.
The results are rarely pretty or very efficient.

The premise of
socialism is bad because it assumes that the people on the bureaucratic
food chain are better at making decisions for you, than you can for
yourself. It is also bad because it uses rhetoric that pretends that it
can treat finite resources as infinite, only to come up against the cold
hard reality that resources are finite after all. Which is when the
rationing finally kicks in.

To take in the current health care
debate, medical resources are finite, because they are

1.) Highly
in demand

2.) Highly expensive and difficult to produce

When
you have resources that are both very much in demand and difficult to
produce, demand will always exceed supply. Doctors and nurses,
technicians, research scientists and pharmacists take time and money to
educate and train. Not to mention the staggering scale of medical
equipment and manufacturing facilities. All these involve a staggering
outlay of resources that cannot simply be made infinite with a few flow
charts. Nor is it possible to significantly change the amount of resources
required to produce them without also diminishing the quality of the final
product, resulting in the kind of medicine you see in Communist and Third
World Marxist dictatorships.

You cannot significantly increase
available medical resources, without also diminishing their quality. You
also cannot significantly alter the distribution of those resources
without draining the overall pool of available resources because
centralization of resources employs them and consumes them far less
efficiently. What you can do is empower people to help others. What you
cannot do is disempower people without decreasing
resources.

Socialism promises something for nothing, but that just
means there's a bigger bill due at the end. Socialist programs do not
create resources, they only exploit them. And despite all the rhetoric
they are still only playing with limited resources, resources that they
are far better at destroying, than creating. The greater their control
becomes, the more resources they demand and the less resources there are
available.

Suppose that we set sail and arrive at a new continent.
Food becomes the issue of most immediate concern. The wild game is quickly
hunted out and very soon, the food supply grows short. There are two
options then, to centralize remaining food supplies under the hands of the
government, which will also control agriculture. Or to let people keep
their food, and advise them to use it carefully, share with the less
fortunate and plant wisely. The scenario is not hypothetical. The
residents of the first permanent English settlement in America, Jamestown,
faced that dilemma. Only by abandoning centralization and embracing the
free market, did Jamestown come to prosper. And the case of Jamestown was
not unique. Early Americans repeatedly faced the choice between
centralization and the free market, and repeatedly chose the free market,
which is what made America a great and prosperous nation.

America
prospered because it trusted the choices that individuals make, more than
the choices that elites make. This premise was behind the American system
of government, the American economy and the American way of life... or
was. By the 20th century the assumption had become that most people were
stupid, ignorant and too weak to resist their worst urges. The social
advocates pushed everything from eugenics to prohibitionism as the
solution. The Depression opened the door to true large scale government
control, and it has never been shut since.

And since then the deficit has grown out of control, government
has repeatedly demonstrated that it lacked the fiscal planning abilities
of a not particularly bright five year old, America's industrial
infrastructure came and went, and about the only growth industries
remaining involve customer service for products made in China. As
government spending continues to swallow individual income, eventually
whatever remains will be sucked into the whirlwind as well. After all
rising government spending and decreasing job growth collide in fairly
predictable ways. Or to put it another way, you can get credit out of a
stone, but you can't get blood out of a stone. And eventually the credit
runs out, and all you have left is the stone.

The reason for this
is that individual initiative repeatedly trumps government bureaucracy
when it comes to using and generation resources better. Advocates of
government centralization by contrast presume that most people are not
very good at making use of their resources, requiring instead that they
render it up to the government which will do a better job of it for them.
This form of involuntary investment repeatedly produces negative results
and it springs from the wholly irrational and elitist notion that people's
wealth and choices should be administered not by them, but only by those
who have been specially trained to administer them.

Individual initiative is the wellspring of democracy. It is also the most effective
means to achieve prosperity while helping others. Rejecting individual
initiative in favor of centralization also rejects democracy.