It takes a worried man to sing a worried song,
And anybody with any SENSE should wonder what has him so worried, not laugh at him for worrying so much.
and in a recent speech that seemed like Larry Summers's swan song, the president's now-departed economic adviser warned that America is "at risk of a profound demoralization with respect to government."
Yeah, and New Orleans is "at risk of profound flooding with respect to hurricanes".  But hey, that's nothing for us to WORRY about.
He fears a future in which "an inadequately resourced government performs badly, leading to further demands that it be cut back, exacerbating performance problems, deepening the backlash, and creating a vicious cycle."
And God forbid that government should use the most OBVIOUS solution to those "inadequate resources" by getting more resources without having to go hit up foreign LOAN SHARKS.  And what solution is that?  Raise taxes, even just a little bit, and HAVE MORE MONEY TO DO THINGS WITH, and not have to wonder how to pay back just the trillions of dollars in INTEREST.

Nope.  That's just insane.

Right?
The vicious cycle that should worry Summers is the reverse of the one he imagines. It is not government being "cut back" because of disappointments that reinforce themselves. Rather, it is government squandering its limited resources, including the resource of competence, in reckless expansions of its scope.
Oh, you mean like trying to pay for not one, but TWO wars at the same time while REDUCING tax revenues?
"There has been," Wilson writes, "a transformation of public expectations about the scope of federal action, one that has put virtually everything on Washington's agenda and left nothing off." Try, Wilson suggests, to think "of a human want or difficulty that is not now defined as a 'public policy problem.'"
I'll go along with this much; there IS too much of government trying to save us all from ourselves.  ONE person does something utterly stupid, so they MUST make it impossible, or at least extremely difficult, or at VERY least ILLEGAL, for ANYONE to ever do it, ever again.

As though passing a new law will prevent stupidity.  Or even accidents.

William J. Baumol, Princeton economics professor emeritus, said that in certain economic sectors - e.g., labor-intensive service industries - productivity will increase, if at all, more slowly than in the rest of the economy. The late senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan's corollary was that such services - e.g., teaching, nursing, the performing arts - tend to migrate to the public sector.

Moynihan noted that if you want a string quartet, you must hire four musicians with four instruments, just as in Chopin's day. "Productivity," said Moynihan, "just hasn't changed much. And when it does - e.g., playing the Minute Waltz in 50 seconds - it doesn't seem to work right." Actually, lopping 10 seconds off the waltz subtracts from musicians' productivity.

Uh huh.  Now imagine that same string quartet with only TWO members, both of them trying to play TWO instruments of the four, and still trying to play that minute waltz in 45 seconds.

Then go explain why that doesn't work, to thousands of CEO's whose sole interest is increasing "profit" by laying off half their employees and wanting the other half to produce the same amount, faster.


image image image
SGT. JIRI TREBISSKY H&D SAS

“A conservative is a man or woman or child who looks backward to ‘the good old days’, and strives mightily to drag the rest of us back there, kicking and screaming if need be.”
~ Jiří Trebissky