The blogosphere is angry. It has sensed a profound unjustice, and it has rallied to cement its indignation in kilobits. Namely, it is angry that a fire department in Tennessee let a man’s trailer burn down because he had not paid his $75 in fees for fire protection.
The thing is, we should be a lot less angry about this fire, as tragic as it was for its victims, and a lot more worried about the fact that the fire department’s actions made perfect sense in the America we’re building these days. Or perhaps I should say taking apart.
As my wife put it to me last night, what happened in Tennessee is exactly what much of the tea party movement wants: a fee based government. It’s government by contract, and what you don’t want or can’t afford to pay for, you don’t have to pay for. You just don’t get the services, either. Glenn Beck put the matter simply on his radio show the other day: “If you don’t pay the 75 dollars then that hurts the fire department,” Beck said. “They can’t use those resources, and you’d be sponging off your neighbor’s resources.”
This notion that one ought to pay only for the services one wants is, of course, a core principle of consumer capitalism—or at least it’s supposed to be. (Did you really want ATT as your mobile phone provider for two years, or did you just want an iPhone? And why do you have to get all those shopping channels on cable or satellite?) And it’s been coming to government for some time: there are retirement communities in Arizona that are exempt from that part of their property taxes that go to schools, for example, and of course fees for seemingly everything have gone up as taxes have gone down.)
This is a substantial break from the old theory of government. For most of the last 200 years, Americans have looked to government to help them achieve collective, public goods: defense, roads, schools, bridges, safe water systems, reasonable court systems, prisons and the like. People disagreed about what and how much to do, but in general there was agreement that such ends were what government was for. As this is exactly what it says the purpose of government is in the Preamble of the US Constitution, I’m pretty sure I’m right on this one.
The Reagan Revolution turned this logic on its head. Government became the problem, not the solution, and any malfeasance or error that government officials made (and there were certainly quite a few) became a symptom of the disease of ineffective government. Moreover, most government actions were cast as takings of freedom: taxes now went to corrupt bureaucrats for pork barrel projects, rather than being seen as fees that pay for services.
At the heart of this sense is an idea I’ve commented on before: the notion of deservingness. Americans will pay to support those who “deserve” it—military, seniors, police and fire (maybe!), but don’t want to pay for those who don’t “deserve” it—the poor, the ill, the young, and perhaps even college professors (okay, that’s a bit too far).
The easy way around the problem of paying taxes to support things you don’t like is simply to move to fee-based government. You select your services a la carte. And if such a payment system kills welfare, so much the better—it just keeps the poor dependent anyway!
This is a real phenomenon, and it’s expanding every day. There are towns in California that have fired their entire police forces and hired officers from neighboring communities, for example. The community in Tennessee in which the fire discussed here occurred has done the same thing but with fire protection.
So one possible future is that we go to a pretty much fee-based America. (People might—might—agree for taxes for the military. Maybe.) Toll roads; privatized “public” education; corporate testing for food and drug safety—well, why not? If I don’t drive, I don’t pay. If I don’t have kids in school, I don’t pay. And as for food and drink, well it’s in producers’ interests to put out healthy stuff. What could possible go wrong?
A fee-based world is many conservatives’ and tea partier’s fantasy. And if you don’t—or can’t—pay, well: sometimes that house is just going to burn down.
Ownership Society FAIL
No comments:
Post a Comment