“The federal budget suggests that just over 20 percent of what the national government does involves the provision of public goods, and the rest involves taking from A and giving to B because politicians want it that way. This isn’t necessarily wicked or nefarious—politicians like Social Security in part because they genuinely care about the welfare of old people, and people voted for the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) because they sincerely believed that it would provide relief to the uninsured and others struggling with medical expenses. Being wrong isn’t the same as being evil; it’s just being wrong.
“…..the cost of government is not the annual toll in taxes and debt, but the forgone benefits that we would have derived from using all of that capital in innovative and productive ways. The $1 trillion that goes into financing the federal deficit every year is $1 trillion not available to invest in Apple (or the next Apple) or to endow the Central Park Conservancy (or the next Central Park Conservancy). The real cost of government is always opportunity cost, but that is difficult to calculate, because free societies and free people are unpredictable. The fact that we are several centuries into a very good run of making people better, richer, freer, healthier, and longer-lived suggests that we free people have some pretty good ideas about how to deploy our resources, and that wagering on our continuing to do so is the smart bet. Assets deployed in antipoverty programs that leave people poorer, in health-care programs that make people less healthy, or for national security projects that make the nation less secure cannot be used for productive purposes. We can only imagine what the world might look like if we had not spent $1 trillion on a War on Poverty that has resulted in more poverty, or roughly the same sum to drop bombs on Iraqis under the theory that eventually the ones who were left would become Swiss.”The political model is constrained in what it can actually accomplish by the knowledge problem discussed above, and our theories of legitimacy and consent mainly serve to mask the substitution of violence for knowledge.”
Excerpt From: Kevin D. Williamson. “The End Is Near and It’s Going to Be Awesome.” HarperCollins, 2013-05-01. iBooks.
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