This is hilariously typical liberal thinking. Consortium News is complaining about a CNBC ad that includes a clip of Milton Friedman making a great point about the fact that government is no more capable of making “right” choices than are private actors. The main complaint is that Friedman’s engaged in “propaganda” because he doesn’t also tout the great accomplishments of government bureaucrats:
Friedman leaves out other accomplishments – from the Declaration of Independence and U.S. Constitution to engineering marvels like the Golden Gate Bridge, Panama Canal, the U.S. Interstate highway system and Netherlands’ dikes – that did emanate from “government bureaus.”
Going back centuries, you could add in the Acropolis of Athens, the Pyramids of Egypt, the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel and many of the world’s great works of architecture and art sponsored by government patrons.
The Acropolis of Athens and the Pyramids of Egypt, of course, were built by slave labor. They are not exactly the testament to the great farsightedness of government officials that Consortium News thinks they are! And the Sistine Chapel ceiling was painted at the command of a theocrat of almost unlimited power, who financed his lavish lifestyle at the expense of serfs whom he terrorized into submission. The Panama Canal, as David McCollough’s great book shows, was more than an engineering marvel; it was also a fiasco of government waste and mismanagement, and seen by Roosevelt and others as just one more helpful element in the U.S.’s imperialistic mission to take over central America, whatever the cost. Yes, let’s all praise the visionary autocrats who wielded government’s coercive power to build giant monuments to their ambition, vanity, and luxury, at the expense of those poor souls, now forgotten, who make up the rest of the unwashed, tea-party masses.
But let’s go back to the Sistine Chapel example for a second. What’s really wrong with the Pope stealing money from people to paint the Sistine Chapel? Nobody denies that it’s a beautiful painting, of course, so it isn’t that. What’s really wrong with that is the fact that the people whose money was stolen didn’t really need a nicely painted chapel ceiling. If they’d been allowed to keep their money, they would have used it for other things—things that they needed, that might not seem to us very grand or impressive, but that would have made their lives better and more livable. If I steal money from my neighbor and I use it to buy a beautiful sculpture, the beauty of that sculpture doesn’t somehow justify my theft. And I’m not even talking about moral terms here—just in plain old economic terms. What Consortium News is doing here is committing the “broken window fallacy”: they’re pointing at the good things that were done with the money that was taken away—and forgetting what people would have bought if they’d been allowed to exercise freedom of choice. Yes, government funding has often produced some remarkable things—the Apollo mission was an awesome feat, and one of the great things mankind has done. But it was done with money that people would have spent on other things if they’d been allowed to choose—things that they needed much more than a mission to the moon. And some of us have real problems saying to a hardworking poor guy with a family to support that he shouldn’t buy that new jacket, because we’re going to take his money away to buy a moon mission for him instead.
Oh, and if you want to say the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were the work of “government bureaucrats”—well, okay, I guess, in a sense. Bureaucrats certainly deserve praise when they limit their own power, even if their descendants who write for Consortium News no longer respect those limits.
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