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Notes -
Government Programs Should Have Legible Budgets
This kind of rule may come across as obvious, pointless, or doomed depending on your perspective.
There is an impulse among many to see a problem in society and turn to government for a solution. I strongly disagree with this impulse. But I also think that these people and myself could come to terms on some shared "rules of engagement".
To start we should agree on some basic things:
There are many devils in the little details, but what these three basic things suggest is that there should be: A set way of collecting taxes. A budget using those taxes that pays out to various social causes. The determination of that budget can be debated upon in some agreed way (maybe by electing representatives to a 'congress'). And that all social programs must go through this set of procedures.
To address the criticisms:
"This is pointless we already do things this way."
Sometimes governments do it this way, sometimes they don't.
The Americans with Disabilities Act does not follow these rules. Private individuals are given the ability to sue other private individuals to provide accommodations for them. The threat of getting sued also encourages a lot of preemptive work on the part of companies. How much does all of this suing and preemptive work cost? No one knows. How much will it cost you to provide for people with disabilities? Maybe a standard amount. Maybe you'll be one of the unlucky ones that gets sued in a new novel interpretation of the law and you'll win a reverse lottery.
How much do you think it is worth it to help disabled people in this country? It seems like a valid political question, but right now the American Government is basically on a blind autopilot path. It cannot know how much is spent. It cannot control how much is spent. And it cannot work out more lucrative and appealing deals for edge cases.
A little while ago (maybe a decade) some university (maybe MIT) decided to put all of their classes online for digital consumption, for free. Sometime later they were forced to take down the entire archive, because they were not subtitled, and a deaf person could not access them. The deaf person wanted them all subtitled. Subtitling a free online resource would have been too expensive and not worth it. So they were instead just removed for everyone. This is the kind of problem that a competent government middleman can solve:
[In the alternative universe where the ADA creates a government middleman agency for solving disability issues.] Each deaf person is allotted $5,000 a year to solve for their disability. They can choose to spend this on hearing implants, or on paying towards having some work transcribed. If enough deaf people want a thing transcribed it gets done. No business owner or non-profit is suddenly held hostage. No single person or entity is stuck paying enormous costs. Things aren't removed from public consumption just because a disabled person can't access it. We know how much is spent on deaf people per year. Medical companies that want to solve or fix a disability have a clear customer market for potential solutions.
This is doomed people would rather have the costs hidden and less obvious.
As I said above, sometimes the government does follow the good set of rules. I'd consider an agency like NASA a good example. The American people give some vague indications of how important they think space science and exploration is to their elected representatives. Those elected representatives can talk with the scientists, engineers, and managers at NASA to determine if maybe there are some important research projects that the general public doesn't know about but might want if they did know about it. NASA's budget is paid through taxes and is a clear line item on the federal budget. For the last two decades NASA has been about 0.5% of the federal budget. Which sounds vaguely correct to me in proportion to how much Americans care about funding Space related stuff.
The cynical reason why I believe that programs have hidden or "laundered" costs is that I don't believe voters would be actually willing to fund them if the true costs were obvious. If a party has a temporary political victory the best the best way to leverage it is through hidden and laundered costs. Pass a medicare act that doesn't really change the rules until you are out of office. Pass a civil rights act with murky enforcement that can be slowly ratcheted up every year.
Despite politicians doing this pretty often, I don't think it is what voters actually want. There is a huge amount of frustration from people over these sorts of policies. Hanania's book the Origins of Woke kind of blew up one of these issues recently. But they are all going to become problems, because when you remove the funding control from government there is no funding control. There is no countervailing force to push down the costs of these various programs. And the only way to get rid of them is often just destroy them altogether. So while people might have supported the ADA if it was 1% of the budget, they might start getting pissed at the program when it balloons up to 10% of the budget and a bunch of reverse lottery sob stories start showing up in the news. And suddenly instead of 10% or even 1% of the budget, you get 0% for your cause and no one trusts you with a 1% allotment cuz they will all remember the horror days of 10%. I don't know how likely a full reversal to 0% is for any of these policies. But that seems to be whats on the table as far as alternatives go.
There is also an ongoing legal weakness to many of these policies. Now that the supreme court is mostly conservative it could start invalidating different laundered cost schemes that have been liberal policy staples for decades. Affirmative action has taken a hit. Paid housing for the homeless might get hit next.
Conclusion
In general I think we should be suspicious of any public program that tries to hide its costs, or launder those costs onto private actors. Anything that expands the scope of things that one individual can sue another for is laundering costs. If you want a social program done or accomplished, you need to be willing to raise taxes and pay for it. If voters can't stomach raising taxes to pay for a particular social program, then too bad! Nothing is free. Start comparing the costs and fighting for them in the agreed upon battlefield.
Doesn't this critique also apply to the whole civil suit edifice? If a company breaks a contract with me, it is the government that backs the court resolution with force if necessary. Which kind of highlights a problem with giving a budget per person. Currently a company might make efforts to not break a contract because I can sue them, and that should count as government spending by this metric? And if the solution applies then each person is given a contract enforcement budget, but, a big company could simply sign a contract for oil rights on my land worth a million dollars, then break the contract and I only get 5000 dollars towards trying to rectify it?
In other words your solution removes the advantage of government force against entities that are less powerful than a government but more powerful than a normal individual. The whole point is to leverage the scale of the government as the aggregate of its citizens. Which I understand is somewhat antithetical to a Libertarian, but I think your proposal is kind of the worst of all worlds. I can see an argument to take the government out of it entirely and I can see an argument to have the government do the whole thing. But where the government does it, but only to a very minor extent for each person just seems more inefficient than either.
Which isn't to say I think the ADA way is right either, I'd rather just have a mandate passed on what a company needs to do, set up a department, people make complaints and the government either finds in the companies favor and does nothing, or uses government power to force the company to comply. Then you could also measure the cost both to the company and to the government of enforcement without diluting the whole purpose of having a government.
There are obligations you agree to and obligations that are forced upon you. If I agree to deliver 10 widgets to you then back out, I've backed out of an obligation I agreed to. If government says I need to deliver 10 widgets to you then I back out, I've backed out of an obligation that has been forced upon me. Obligations that are forced upon people seem like takings to me. If I had any faith in older supreme courts I'd wonder why they weren't considered 5th amendment violations.
I would be somewhat fine with this solution if they also kept track of the costs of these mandates, possibly by allowing partial tax write offs for anyone complying with them. I'm not really firmly fixed on a particular solution for this problem, just firmly in the position that it is a problem.
A mandate without funding is just a sneaky tax and spending scheme that doesn't get added to the government balance books and has far less oversight and checks/balances than other forms of spending. Even if you are a big government liberal there are good reasons to dislike this kind of scheme. There are not unlimited resources, and unless you only care about one particular pet issue that is using one of these mandates without funding then there is less wealth available for all other issues. Take this pet example:
All businesses must spend about $10k to accommodate a particular disability. The disability can also be fixed with a surgery. Fixing the disability for everyone would average out to about $5k per business. The government in this case could tax the businesses $9k each, spend $5k paying for fixing the disability, and then have $4k in tax revenue left over. The business is happier with this solution, the disability is solved for all cases (and places that get exclusions from ADA aren't also excluding people with the disability.)
I am Libertarian, but I also was an Economics Major in college. The ADA stuff bothers my economist side just as much as it bothers my libertarian side. If I am going to have a government doing things that I don't like, can I at least ask that they not do it stupidly and waste a bunch of money?
Sure! And I think the government should absolutely be deciding how much money it should be spending on say the ADA per person (assuming we decide it should be done at all which is of course not a given!). But I think then leaving it up to the person to have to coordinate on which businesses to target, is basically wasting the reason why governments are useful at all, which is coordinating these kind of issues.
And you will get no argument from me that governments should be do much better at keeping track of what is paid for what and the costs vs benefits of x. I was in government (local and central) long enough that I am certain I have had several rants about it.
As I mentioned, not too attached to the particular solution I had. Just that this is a problem. So I don't think we disagree too much.
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