I once had a roommate who liked to engage me in intellectual conversation and debate. He was a few years younger than I, and I was happy to talk to him not just in an attempt to make him think more like me, but simply to practice my persuasive skills for future audiences, should they ever materialize.
We had an immediate problem.
For some reason (perhaps he was trolling me the whole time and laughs about it to this day, I dunno) he was only willing to think in binary terms. If I said that the government shouldn’t provide a service, he would accuse me of not wanting that service to exist at all. If I changed tack and suggested instead that the private sector would provide a “government-only” service better, his stock explanation was that the private sector was incapable or unwilling to provide said service, necessitating the government solution.
It didn’t matter how many examples I presented of things that were government services in one place (or time) and private in another; trash disposal, for example. The residents of one town cannot seem to keep the garbage men in business but in another, sometimes even just a few miles away, the free market thrives and the waste management entrepreneur lives a comfortable life, I guess by some sort of sorcery. He never seemed to be able to explain how that could happen and would scoff when I told him only laws and other artificial barriers to market entry can create situations like those. Also, to him, I was a monster that wanted widows and orphans to starve because I despise government welfare programs. To suggest that there was another way to fight poverty and homelessness would meet a blank look. He believed that government only solved problems, rather than create and/or make them worse.
Yea, and to even think that there were some scumbags in power that want problems to get worse just to get a budget increase was ludicrous. Can’t really blame them, though; who’d want to actually solve a problem if it meant you would eventually make yourself unemployed? The free market would force them out of business, but if the state controls the market for solutions, problems can go on indefinitely. Look at the Department of Education; whatever you think of our educational model, it’s hard to argue that we’ve improved in the global scheme of things since they’ve been around.
Again, maybe he was trolling me. He seemed to honestly believe that public sector was somehow more virtuous than private, and that the system we had was the best one possible. And since we had the best system, there was no reason to keep looking for better ways to do things, so any type of break in the monopoly of the state was absolutely too terrifying to think about; why, it’d be a warzone with mercenaries having running gun battles all over the suburbs, I tells ya!!
Anyway, I hope he’s well, has learned that he’s not smart enough to have all of the answers, and that our regulatory framework is ill-suited to true innovation in a number of areas, which stifles improvements. We need freedom to innovate and make life better for everyone. Only the most delusional think we’re better off in caves.
