I’ll preface this with a shocking statement, I’m sure:
I like taxes. Especially for public works!
Having public buildings, parks, roads and civil projects that I can use and aren’t owned by one guy or group is a great benefit for everyone and yet time and time again people tell me stuff like: “If they made the road right the first time it wouldn’t need to be fixed! That’s government for ya!” to the truly stupid: “We don’t need to spend money on this park, we need more jobs!”. I ask these people who gets paid for to do said jobs or why the road needs repairs and usually I get the same responses of “Stupid Government workers”. When I tell them for example that the road is heavily damaged by tractors moving on and off of it or that it costs very little to maintain a small park and the people who maintain it are doing a job I just kinda give up as they go into further tirades against anything from “Obama stealing my bullets” to the insanity that is “We should only pay taxes for soldiers! Let people buy the national park land and use it!”
I guess my debate is this: Why would anyone want to use tax money more on weapons of war and soldiers than on public works or improving the nation as a whole? I find it hard to really grasp the idea that people who see themselves as not wanting or needing government still wanting to be “protected”. These are the same people who have entire closets full of guns and yet want only money spent ON more guns. Why waste so much on defense when your own home is falling apart?
It’s simple. You like something. You are not content to have it supported by your contributions and by contributions of other people who like it. You insist on reaching into other people’s pockets in order to support it. Then you wonder why those people resent it.
Because government is something we have no choice but to fund and all of us have either some specific government actions we dislike or better yet some service-interaction with government that is terrible.
This transcends all levels of government. If the DMV was a privately run business, open to competition, it would be bankrupt in a month because no one would put up with such horrific service if there was a competitor out there. But there isn’t, because it’s the DMV, and you also basically have to engage in those service interactions with the DMV if you want to drive.
Individuals that do not understand that roads need continual maintenance are stupid, cars work best on nice smoothish road surfaces, and the only way to get that with current technology to scale is to build a road that also happens to wear out relatively quickly. Yes, Roman Roads were “built to last” but they had relatively slow moving cart, horse, and foot traffic and thus are subject to far different operating conditions.
But individuals that don’t like public parks are perfectly within their rights, and are in fact behaving rationally, when they say “why can’t we spend either less money or the money on something else that I do like?” There are multiple ways to run government, here in Virginia while you may have to pay fees for certain special services at a State Park (like cabin or camping area rentals), by and large access to the parks themselves are free to users. The Parks are paid for in part by any profits made at the park (from the users buying paid services) and tax revenue. In Texas many State Parks have an admission fee to even enter, in Texas they have made a decision where State Parks receive a much large portion of their funding from people that choose to use those parks.
I don’t really think this is well thought out. You seem puzzled why someone wouldn’t want to spend money on something you like but would want to spend money on something they liked. The simple reason is, there are people out there who feel the same way about military spending that you do about park spending or library spending.
Your whole point about money on parks generating jobs etc can also be made about military spending, so is also an irrelevancy in the context of your broader argument.
It’s just a way of stealth-bragging to their peers that they are “macho” (“I’m into big guns!”) and “rich” (“Everyone wants to get their hands on my money!”) Seriously, it really doesn’t go any deeper that.
No, I think complaining about government works is pretty much something I see from all over the political, personal, and economic spectrum. It’s not limited to men wanting to look macho or people who want to appear rich.
For example even a lefty that loves government spending might be someone who criticizes certain types of spending. For example an office building where say, city employees work is built with millions of dollars of marble, fancy embellishments and is filled with expensive art that the city commissioned from well known artists. Okay, there is something to be said for grandeur, it has its place. But this isn’t city hall, it’s just a building of government drones. Every dollar extra you spent on that building, instead of just making it a nicely designed but not-opulent building is money that isn’t available for street cleaning, or park beautification, or after school programs etc. There are real budget limitations at all levels of government and if you want more money for parks and schools you may take issue with government going overboard building fancy office buildings for administrators and office drones when city teachers haven’t been given an increase in their supplies budget in 18 years and all the after school programs were canceled due to lack of funding.
So in that scenario there’s no reason someone would have to be macho or trying to “appear rich” to oppose the government works, in fact they could be a hardcore liberal that still expects government dollars to be prioritized appropriately and they are disagreeing with the prioritization the current politicians have made.
Advertising works. It even works on people who claim they’re too smart to be influenced by advertising. Because the empirical evidence is that people buy things due to advertising.
And advertising doesn’t just sell products. It can also be used to sell ideas. And the ideas people believe are influenced by advertising just like the products they buy are. Even when those people deny their ideas are influenced by advertising. And even when they deny the advertising exists. Because a lot of advertising is disguised and doesn’t look like advertising.
So private businesses advertise the idea that government services are inefficient and private businesses are efficient. They sell this idea because it promotes private businesses. And people believe the idea in large part because they’ve been exposed to this advertising.
I don’t think that’s really accurate. Private businesses mostly advertise their products and services, they don’t tend to do negative ad campaigns targeted at government services. This is because in most areas the government functions they are not in direct competition with business, plus private business make megabucks off of government contracting so would probably have no desire to point out the huge inefficiencies and waste inherent in government procurement because by and large the beneficiaries of that waste are private businesses.
I have no problem with that at all - nobody wants to see wasteful/misguided spending or bloated government, and it’s essential to have checks and balances to prevent that sort of thing.
I think, however, that the OP is referring to a specific group of trendy, vocal self-styled “libertarians” who declare that the very concept of public works is invalid (“let’s privatize everything, the government can’t be trusted with my money!”) but give a pass to any sort of military spending. We’ve probably all met people like this and I think that persona is firmly tied to banal stealth bragging about how rich and macho that person is.
You can like roads and still be of the opinion that they are poorly constructed. Which they are. Haven’t seen any cost analysis that shows better construction is worth the money but I believe that to be the case. And the life span of modern bridges seem extremely short considering the bridges built by Roebling. I’ve lived long enough to see 2 concrete bridges built in the same location. Seriously, we can’t construct a bridge that lasts more than 35 years?
It would be nice if we used the road standards in Germany so we aren’t constantly playing orange barrel roulette every time it rains.
I find that human stupidity and selfishness explains a lot of things about the world
Government, like Seinfeld once said, is like parents for adults. They tell you what’s right or wrong, what you can and cannot do. Of course as adults, many of us are going to try to rebel against that, thinking we know better. Often times we don’t, but we don’t really have to pay the consequences unless you broke a law. So many of us sit on the sidelines and bitch
Public works are in your face too, a tax payer sees, or thinks he sees, waste of his hard earned money.
The military is an abstract expenditure, tax payers don’t come into contact with it directly. We just get the bill at the end, and how on earth can you put a price on human life?
The price of a human life lost on a failing bridge is abstracted.
Some people are simply too utilitarian in their outlook. If it’s not a matter of life and death, then it’s a feel-good extravagance.
This is why we’re seeing public schools doing without art, music, and PE. In a lot of people’s minds, these things are seen as non-essential extras that make school “nice”, but serve little utility. It doesn’t matter that these areas promote learning across the board and help kids enjoy school. Nor does it matter to these people that future artists, creative professionals, and athletes need to be trained somehow.
And then there are some people who just have a failure of imagination and education. I frequently hear people bemoan environmental regulation as being too stringent. These people are being protected so well that the dangers no longer exist to them. They know what terrorism looks like because it’s on the evening news every night. But they don’t know what mercury poisoning from contaminated fish looks like, or what really bad air pollution can do.
We’re 11 posts in and the topic is already depressingly politicized but I’ll try by best.
People hate on government works for three reasons:
The government is generally perceived as being wasteful at best and corrupt at worst.
Most people do not understand rudimentary economics.
People like it when the government does things that benefit them and do not like it when the government does things that do not benefit them.
To elaborate:
People perceive the government as being wasteful and corrupt, and so when the government spends a great deal of money it’s widely assumed that the money is wasted.
Of course, this reputation is wholly deserved. The government quite often IS corrupt and wasteful; the term “pork barrel spending” was not invented out of thin air. Of course, government works are quite often necessary, important, and well conceived; the Hoover Dam was built under time and budget and is of enormous benefit to the people. But for every Hoover Dam there’s a Bridge To Nowhere, or the Montreal Olympic Stadium, or some similar disaster. I still remember a few years ago when a committee to create an Olympic bid for the City of Toronto spent six times their allocated budget on the bid. Now, how trusting do you think I am that if Toronto got the Olympics, it would stay within budget?
So when the government proposes to spend money, people naturally react with great skepticism.
People don’t understand economics. Specifically, people don’t get the concept of externalities and market failures.
There are some things that are just better for the government to buy, and there are some things that are just better for private industry to run. There is really no realistic chance that you will ever be able to have an effective system of public highways built, operated and owned by a private outfit (though of course private companies do a great job building them for the government.) You need a government to maintain a system of justice, national defense, to regulate the use of public airwaves, and various other things that just don’t work privately. You do NOT need the government to, say, run an airline, which is why national airlines usually end up being hilarious money-losers. Where you get a lot of politcal tension is in this divide between public and private, where you get into some concepts of economics that most people simply do not grasp. Health care in the USA in in the grips of nationawide ignorance over the concept of adverse selection. Canadians are irrationally opposed to a free trade agreement with Europe because they don’t get comparative advantage. Public works are much the same way; you get a lot of people saying “well, only people who want X should pay for it” ignoring all the Economics 101 concepts like the free rider problem, prisoner’s dilemma, and other things they either forgot or didn’t study.
People like the government paying for things they like and not for things they don’t like. There is no way around the fact that someone who dislikes camping and nature isn’t going to see a great deal of value in the government maintaining Yellowstone, while someone who doesn’t live in the Southwest will probably ask what the Hoover Dam’s doing for them. I’m not sure how you can avoid that. People tend to notice the waste in the other city and celebrate the money spent in their own.
As I said, it’s not blatant advertising. You don’t see commercials or billboards saying “Government bad. Private business good.”
But think about it. Every television show you watch is produced by a private business. Every movie you watch is produced by a private business. Every magazine or newspaper you read is published by a private business. Every book you read is published by a private business. Every radio broadcast you listen to is produced by a private business. Private businesses essentially own all forms of mass communication.
They don’t have to blatantly insert their views into the media. But choices are made. Every form of media is making choices. Who gets hired and who doesn’t. What stories are published and which aren’t. What stories are broadcast and which aren’t. Who has access to a national audience and who doesn’t. And all these decisions are being made by people who own and run private businesses. It’s impossible to see how a pro-private viewpoint doesn’t enter into the media. It may not even be intentional; it’s just people passing on the views they believe are true.
And in a strange juxtaposition, Texas Parks and Wildlife (TPWD) is one of the very, very few state agencies that actually comes out in the black every year, and perversely, their spare money is dragooned into paying for other state agencies, instead of being plowed back into parks and wildlife conservation/regulation, as I think it should be.
Considering the abuse we put on roads I amazed they last as long as they do. The Brooklyn Bridge, as one of Roebling’s works, does not allow trucks or buses which are the vehicles that can do the most damage, especially fully loaded trucks.
Plenty of bridges have lasted more than 35 years, but they do need maintenance to do so. You might point to some quaint medieval stone bridge in Germany but I would have to ask how many times did they have to do repairs on it over the centuries?
The Republican message for more than 30 years as been “Government sucks. Government is Incompetent. Government is nothing but waste and fraud. Corporations and Private Businesses are more efficient. Private Businesses can and should do everything the Government does, and they will do it better.”
That message is wrong, of course, but more than a generation of pounding it into a nation has an effect.