WHO SHOULD PAY FOR THE THINGS WE TAKE FOR GRANTED?

I am puzzled by the number of people who comment on news items on Facebook, Blog sites, and other resources on the web. A considerable number of these comments reflect what I would classify as Libertarian (or Conservative) thinking.  It may be about something like unions and teacher’s salaries and the protections given teachers from being fired. The comments are often dismissive of such organization for collective bargaining.  They argue that people should pay for what they get, follow their bosses’ rules, and not expect government to pay for their needs such as medical insurance, retirement, or unemployment insurance.   Libertarianism and conservatism appeals to those who see themselves as self-made or self-reliant.  They like being rugged individualists and I do not doubt their strong work ethic. But consider this. To have a civilization like the US enjoys requires the activities of thousands of different occupations.  Let us say government paid for nothing but a standing military.  You now take your monthly paycheck and have to pay for the following: health insurance, accident insurance, car insurance, house insurance, lawsuit insurance. You have to pay for fire department protection; you now have to pay for police protection; you have to pay for sanitation to remove trash; you have to pay for clean safe chlorinated water to drink and  bathe; you have to pay for snow removal of the streets; you have to pay for repairs of pot holes in the streets taking you to work; you have to pay for scholarly books (500 dollars each) if the press is to make money when publishing is not subsidized; you have to pay for the research that gives you the modern medicines and drugs you and your family will need; you will pay for the airports, harbors, RR tracks, new highways.  The list will mushroom on all the hidden costs—mail delivery, weather forecasting and reporting, maintaining the internet, providing passports for travel to other countries, seeing to it that the meat and foods you eat are not contaminated, seeing to it that your children do not play in a haze of pollutants, inspecting bridges so they don’t collapse, keeping records of who owns the land your house resides on so that you can eventually sell it.  I don’t individually have to pay for all these hundreds or thousands of errands to keep society working.   Private volunteer work or profit making organizations might not work because not enough people even know about these things that make urban life possible.  And if they defaulted and did not pay up, streets would be filled with abandoned homes, burnt out houses, and impassable streets because no one was paying for the constant upkeep necessary for hundreds of services. 

  Libertarianism downplays the social contract that is necessary for everyone to have hundreds of activities that would bankrupt most of us if we had to write a hundred or more checks a month to pay for them.  At the same time you would be at the mercy of lawsuits for your neglect to do all the repairs and protections that government agencies and services provide. Since ignorance of the law is no excuse, you would have to be aware of hundreds of potential liabilities because you would be responsible for everything that can possibly go wrong. We have to organize to get things done.  Telling those who earn little that they should seek private charity (mostly from churches) is a bad idea because when people are stressed financially they will cut back on their charitable giving especially during depressions or setbacks in the economy.  Democracies with some mixture of private and public funding work better than pure laissez faire capitalism or pure socialism.  

NAOMI ORESKE’S MERCHANTS OF DOUBT

NAOMI ORESKE’S MERCHANTS OF DOUBT

We went to the second of Naomi Oreske’s Patten lectures at Indiana University.  She discussed her book Merchants of Doubt.  In the 1970s a coalition formed between two political economists, Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hajek and four physicists Robert Jastrow, Frederick Seitz,  William Nierenberg, and Frederick Singer.  The economists were Ayn Rand type libertarians who believed that government regulation led to government control led to socialism led to communism and loss of freedom. They favored laissez faire capitalism, a powerful military, and a fear of liberals, environmentalists, and critics of government (especially of the conservative government they favored). As Cold Warriors they joined and formed think tanks with the financial backing of millionaires and billionaires who shared their outlook.  One of these was the George Marshall Institute.  Its members included the four physicists, two of whom (Seitz and Singer) had been consultants to the tobacco industry.  The tobacco industry funded research which favored the tobacco industry’s position that tobacco had no bad health effects on the respiratory or circulatory systems or the induction of cancers. They came up with the strategy of casting doubt on the critics, especially in the medical field, who claimed tobacco was the major cause of these diseases in smokers or in persons exposed to second hand smoke exhaled at home or in the work place.  These four scientists used the same strategy and their institutes to deny that coal heavy in sulfur caused acid rain, that fluoridated hydrocarbons used as refrigerants and propellants were the cause of the ozone hole widening in Antarctica, and that human produced carbon dioxide was the cause of global warming leading to dramatic climate change.  They did so not because they were financially dependent on the industries causing the pollution but because of their ideology as cold warriors and libertarians favoring the interests of industry and the military.  

Even earlier the chemical industry used the strategy of casting doubt on the role of DDT in the disappearance of birds from widespread spraying of insecticides.  During the Vietnam war the same strategy of doubt was used to deny any ecological or health problems associated with the spraying of herbicides (Agent Orange, especially) to destroy crops sand to clear areas used by the Viet Cong.  Even earlier, my mentor, Hermann Muller, was assailed by those using radiation in the military, industry, or health for suggesting low doses of radiation were cumulative and that that society needed protection from avoidable exposure of radiation and excessive release of radiation.  Even earlier than that, if you read Henrik Ibsen’s play An Enemy of the People, you will see that Norwegian policy in the 1800s was against those who raised fears of contagious diseases from the slovenly habits and neglect that was tolerated during the infancy of the public health movement.   I would not be surprised it can be traced even further back to classic Greek drama where messengers with bad news were neither welcome nor tolerated (think of Oedipus or think of the way prophets were ignored in the Old Testament).  Wishful thinking goes with ideology of the left or right.   Those with power are not willing to give up their privileges when criticized by findings that bad outcomes can arise from the activities of the powerful. It is not just dictators but anyone who lives by wishful thinking that favors denial to regulation in the public interest. We may no longer kill the messengers, but we sure like to cast doubt, scorn, or denial on their concerns and warnings.