"Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy, its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery." Winston Churchill
George Rebane
[This is the transcript of my regular bi-weekly KVMR radio commentary broadcast on 13 April 2012.]
Years ago when our kids were in early grade school, mom would bake a big batch of delicious chocolate chip cookies every Sunday evening for the kids’ lunches in the coming week. The cookies went into a big cookie jar that lived on the white-tiled kitchen counter. The Monday lunches always got their full complement of cookies and so did the Tuesday lunches. But mysteriously by Tuesday evening the cookie jar was empty. Well, it wasn’t a mystery at all, each kid took every opportunity to reach in the jar and grab a few when going through the kitchen.
What to do to make the cookies last the whole week? I had just finished reading an essay by a college professor named Garrett Hardin titled ‘The Tragedy of the Commons’, and the solution came like a flash. It turns out that we had made the cookie jar into a commons, and as the good professor made clear, all commons are destroyed by their consumers. All we had to do was to divide up the cookies into bags with each kid’s name on it, and each could do what they wanted with their own stash. Miraculously the cookies lasted the whole week as each managed their own supply – they even used the cookies to barter for things like trading chores. The main thing was that on Sunday nights the cookies immediately had owners who managed them through the week to their own benefit.
Dr Hardin was a renowned social scientist whose ideas were variously embraced and vilified by both the right and the left. He formalized the idea of a commons as a commonly held and consumed resource like the pasture land of a village in which the local inhabitants would let their milk cows graze (think of the Boston commons). The bad part of a commons is that the incremental cost of consuming an increased share of the commons is not paid by that consumer.
Hardin told the story of a commons that had a carrying capacity of ten cows, each one belonging to a different family. Soon one of them decided to get a little extra income by introducing another cow. So now eleven cows ate the grass and each one got a little less but that didn’t matter in the scheme of things – yet. Soon another family saw the benefit of an extra cow and added theirs. This was rapidly picked up by the other families, and twenty skinnier cows were eating less grass and giving less milk. It didn’t take long for the third cows to be added in the attempt to make up for the poor milk production. And you can see, that before long, the commons was bare of grass, the cows didn’t give milk and had to be sold or slaughtered, and everyone lost.
But while the game went on, if you decided to be a good citizen and not add another cow, you immediately got penalized. That is what Hardin was trying to tell people, altruistic behavior doesn’t work in sustaining a commons, especially when it is consumed at near its carrying capacity. And so the commons are eventually destroyed. And again we have the problem of what to do.
The obvious answer is to police the commons. Put in place a bureaucracy with regulatory and policing powers that sets and enforces the standards. This is how we have come to deal with commons such as our air, publicly owned lands, rivers, and also social services. The problem with the consumption policing is that it is expensive and its expense becomes unaffordable over time. And it is very often totally ineffective, sometimes even accelerating the destruction of the commons. Here we all know which commons we are talking about – think of Medicare and Medicaid, think of the various welfare programs which compel school dropouts and unemployment, think of public service employee pension agreements.
These are all commons that have broken their cost-to-consumer feedback mechanisms as taught by Hardin. Voters and politicians each consume these government commons for their own purposes. And each one takes a bit more benefit for himself without having to bear the cost of that increment, and thereby leaves the commons more depleted for the next round of consumers, until finally it becomes untenable to maintain, and it is destroyed.
Socialism is a form of governance based on an entire society unsustainably consuming from diverse commons set up to provide every possible benefit from cradle to grave. But somehow it always leads to a tragic end when that personal responsibility link is replaced with the expectation of altruism or the police.
My name is Rebane, and I also expand on these and other themes in my Union columns, and on georgerebane.com where this transcript appears. These opinions are not necessarily shared by KVMR. Thank you for listening.
More Milestones on our Downward Spiral
George Rebane
This week has seen a lot of dilapidation in our ship of state. For openers, Peggy Noonan takes an overarching survey of events that reflects on our national character. From other perspectives we see what it is to be on a careening progressive luge as this administration more fully reveals itself, and what it can accomplish after getting the hang of it during the last three years. A minimally hopeful sign is that more than a few Democrats are beginning to shake their heads at the excesses of socialist thought.
After all the information sharing between our intelligence services ordained by 9/11, we now hear that the FBI has pulled out of that little daisy chain, and has gone back to its insular ways of doing business. It seems they weren’t getting that much from other agencies, and their stuff was leaking out. A correlative to this is that the US seems to have shut down its pursuit of Russian spies on these shores, in spite of professional estimates (including from defectors) that Russia today has more spies in the US than it did during the Cold War, and has declared America to be its number one intelligence target. The last prosecution of a Russian spy (Robert Hanssen) was in 2001, which case indicated that there was at least one more mole left in the fabric of the DOD.
In the meantime, the Transportation Safety Administration is starting to implement its VIPR program of checkpoints on US highways (google ‘VIPR checkpoints’ for a snootful). The first ones were being tested in Florida to gauge public reaction to them. It is, of course, all done for our own safety and to check the terrorist threat. The counterpart of the policy is a further achievement of Agenda21 goals and objectives. The checkpoints will spread from commercial transport vehicles to private automobiles in no time. And, as everything else responding to the terrorist threat, these will remain a permanent fixture of our constantly expanding state that continues to grow 20% faster than our private sector economy.
A couple of years back we were on a bus from Alexandria to Cairo, and shook our heads sadly at what the Egyptians had to live with as we passed checkpoint after checkpoint manned by tough looking guys sporting AK-47s and more sinister stuff. It can’t happen in America.
Back at the ranch, it seems that harbingers of the Great Divide are already in full swing. Nationally known demographer and “Truman Democrat” Joel Kotkin writes and extensive peace on ‘The Great California Exodus’ and “what is driving the middle class out of the Golden State” (to loud denials from the loyal looney left). It used to be only the mobile ‘rich’ who packed their bags and their companies to head to points east (I was going to say more about this, but Russ Steele beat me to it on NC2012).
Adding to the whole picture of our country’s ongoing and growing cross migrations is a report by Art Laffer and Stephen Moore about what impact the states’ income and corporate tax policies have had on states’ revenues and GDPs. This is in addition to the Mercatus Center report we brought home from their Scottsdale conference last month.
But I don’t know whether to laugh or cry when reading that Elizabeth Warren, running for Congress in Massachusetts, has had at least one epiphany, maybe two. The border line communist and "liberal heroine", recently on Team Obama, now acknowledges that 1) when you tax something more, you get less of it, and 2) real wealth and jobs are actually created by entrepreneurial private sector companies. In fact she, along with a growing cohort of Democrats, are daily finding more and more things not to like about the impact this administration’s biggest lie, Obamacare, and faux pas on stopping the Keystone pipeline. Even Barney Frank (gasp!) has climbed on this wagon.
So that’s a little update on how we are quietly becoming a progressive police state with daily more criminalized behaviors on the books, ever increasing taxes, frantic migrations of people seeking freedom, and a growing government that continues to add bureaus and (monitoring/enforcement) functions employing thousands to sop up the unemployable and increase its cohort of supporters on autopilot. And then there are the rest of us.
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