Holes In Thoughts: The Good Government

Sunday, February 03, 2008

The Good Government

It used to be the people in power could pretty much sit back, have orgies and collect taxes until the Revolution came, and when it did they were treated to a quick death that sure beat syphilis.

Now, the best they can hope for is a blowjob and some kickbacks (although, the above is still true in parts of the Middle East, former parts of the USSR, and most of Africa).

The biggest reason for that is that in developed countries, the citizenry have raised the bar of expectations to levels a 13th-century serf couldn't have imagined: free education, good roads, and food regulations. More recently, free public health care and welfare programs have upped the ante substantially (to mixed success). The government is suddenly there for the common good! But it's not the easiest thing to get people to do what's good for them in the long term, or as a whole, when they can do stuff that benefits them in the short-term but hurts the group as a whole.

Take those ubiquitous little plastic shopping bags. About two thousand are made per second (42 billion per year), and a lot of them end up in landfills, but an awful lot end up in forests, streams and sewage systems. It's a little problem, on an individual scale, but when anything is multiplied by millions or billions, things get dicey. This is the kind of problem that governments are ideally suited to fix. Ireland has done a nice job in the way that a government knows best: action through taxes. It charged 33 cents per bag sold (a type of 'sin tax') and suddenly everyone uses cloth bags, putting the plastic bags in the category of social ills like not picking up your dog's poo.

This is how governments can do some real good very easily: appeal to the Capitalist system we use to make it profitable or in people's best interest to do the right thing. Obama wants to charge companies and power-plants for every pound of smog produced, and give the income to subsidize the companies that buck up and use more expensive, non-polluting means.

Labels: food, government, history, money, Obama, taxes

posted by Steve @ 1:56 PM

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