What Can Government Do?

     Millions seem to believe government can do anything. 
The flip side is they also believe nothing can be accomplished
without government.  This attitude of dependence on government
grows every day.

     The gold standard for government accomplishment is a
man on the Moon.  Man on the Moon spawned the phrase "If we
can put a man on the Moon, Why can't we _____________?"  
At one time or another that blank has been occupied with about
every unachieved goal known to humans.  Rarely, if ever, have I
heard any of those questions answered.

     First we will consider what the government actually did
in putting a man on the Moon.  Government hired private
businesses to do the heavy lifting.  Government set the goal and
confiscated the resources from the private sector through taxation
and borrowing.

     In other words the private sector put men on the Moon. 
All government did was coerce and bribe the private sector. 
Those businesses that profited from the Moon project
enthusiastically went along.

     Everything comes with a price.  Doing one thing requires
passing up the opportunity to do something else.  Economists
call the lost opportunity the "opportunity cost."

     Going to the Moon had many opportunity costs for many
people.  We will never know what millions gave up to put a
man on the Moon.  We can have some ideas about the nature of
the sacrifice.

     People first spend resources to achieve their most
important goals.  If putting a man on the Moon had been the
most important goal for the people forced to pay for it, those
people would have voluntarily paid to put a man on the Moon. 
The mere fact that people had to be coerced proves that a man
on the Moon was well down their priority list.

     Eventually man would have visited the Moon.  Very
possibly voluntary efforts would not yet have achieved that goal. 
We would have used the lunar resources to have achieved other
things, perhaps cures for some diseases.  For most people going
to the Moon has provided no more benefit than does the home
team winning a ball game.

     The Moon project boils down to one thing, powerful
people in government forced millions to sacrifice their more
important goals to pursue a goal that was important to powerful
people.  That goal wasn't important enough to those powerful
people for them to finance it with their own wealth.

     Nevertheless, government did command the resources that
greatly accelerated man's arrival on the Moon.  Why does
government fail to achieve goals such as ending poverty or
stopping drug use?

     Putting a man on the Moon involved things.  Government
efforts are usually wasteful.  Still, if government can seize
enough resources it can hire the private sector to achieve any
physical thing that is achievable.

     Poverty, education, drug use, and most other problems we
face are matters of human choice and behavior.  When it comes
to achieving positive changes in human behavior, force, coercion
and bribes (the only tools of government) are next to useless. 
Usually force and threats result in people behaving in more
destructive ways

     Government's attempts to change behavior have mainly
created attitudes of victimhood and dependence on government. 
In the process government has forced most of us to sacrifice our
important goals to fund government failure.

     A recent article reported that the money the government
spent on poverty during 2011 was enough to have given every
poor household over $59,000.  Yet most of those households are
still ranked below the poverty line.

     What can we expect in the future?  Nothing but more
government failures and waste denying us the opportunities to
purse our most important goals.  Unless we somehow achieve a
major change in voter attitudes, the toboggan ride to the end will
only accelerate.  The end  won't be on the Moon.

aldmccallum@gmail.com
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Copyright 2013
Albert D. McCallum