From: Charlie Stross (charlie@antipope.org)
Date: Thu Aug 08 2002 - 03:24:22 MDT
On Wed, Aug 07, 2002 at 04:41:32PM -0400, Rafal Smigrodzki wrote:
> but
> for organising those common functions that don't self-organise and don't
> work well in the market but that we the people can benefit from. We live
> in a complex, and ever more complex world, and it increasingly requires
> regulatory mechanisms. This is axiomatic -- to me, if not to you -- and
> if you don't agree, then we'll just have to agree to differ.)
>
> ### I happen to agree with you but I am curious if we also agree precisely
> which functions need this form of organization. I see very few.
And I see quite a large number. Firstly, preventing aggression by external
governments that might wish to impose a confiscatory or oppressive regime.
Secondly, provision of an environment in which property rights are
observed and free trade can take place without fear of banditry and theft,
and in which contracts can be enforced without individual contractees
having to come up with the money to pay for enforcement. (If you don't
have the latter, you end up with a situation where the rich can vary
contracts to suit themselves and the poor stay poor because they can't
defend themselves against abuse.)
Then we can go a bit further. Protecting the commons springs to mind;
that's the air we breathe, and the water we drink, and analogous things
we can't do without sharing. (That is: to cut someone off from access
to these things is likely to be fatal to them, but to allow unregulated
access can result in a tragedy of the commons.) Infrastructure
regulation -- transport, power, gas -- also come into this category
these days.
Getting controversial: insurance, and particularly health insurance, is
a common good. Insurance companies have a strong incentive to exclude
marginal applicants, but excluded individuals can be a threat to the
lives of the included -- the classic example is a health insurance system
that excludes poor people with multi-drug resistant TB (who in turn act
as a reservoir for infections that don't care how rich or insured you
are). I submit that the best way to deal with this is to have a universal
healthcare mechanism. A pension system is a bit more controversial,
but if we class managing senescence and disabilities as an illness,
we get them back under the umbrella of a common good.
If we treat healthcare as a common good, we obviously need to minimize
the burden on the service by preventing accidents and shifting the burden
of payment -- where there's an obvious culprit -- onto the culprit. This
is a working justification for health and safety regulations in the
workplace -- or for employers to be liable for employee accidents incurred
when the employees were working under their instructions.
Unemployment insurance? I'm beginning to scratch my head. (I'm not sure
I've ever been involuntarily unemployed.) To some extent, the need for
unemployment insurance depends on how the rest of society is organised;
if there's a large informal economy with scope for obtaining the basics
without being employed in the traditional sense of the word, then the
stress of unemployment may be mitigated, but if no such marginal system
exists and there's a structural problem in the economy, some way of managing
unemployment is vital -- the alternative is mass starvation or insurrection,
both of which are the opposite of a common good (they're bad for the people
involved in them, and bad for everyone else, too).
Then there are the intangible things. If I feel like erecting a gaudy
sculpture on the (non-existent) lawn outside my home, it's not unreasonable
for me to do so, is it? But if I feel like building a 20 foot high midden,
other people might well object, even though it's on my land. This sort of
clash of ideas about how the environment should be shaped would, in the
absence of planning guidelines, degenerate into a sea of petty lawsuits
or even violence and vandalism. It's better to have zoning guidelines,
public policy on the appearance of buildings, and so on, than to turn
every public interaction into a potential tort. And so we have an example
of what you might call the aesthetic commons: we need public arts policies
and planning bodies who can say "no" to proposed construction work
because if we didn't we'd be buried in a sea of allegations that person A's
new extension on their house was damaging the resale value of person B's
home next door.
In the broader picture, a given nation exists within a world of other
nations. Free trade, whatever the demonstrators believe, exists to the
extent that corporations can shift their centres of operations out of a
country that stops providing a comfortable environment for them. So it
makes sense to make provision for an educated workforce. Given that most
young people who are about to enter higher education are not able to pay
for their education, it seems reasonable to loan them the costs up-front
-- at as low a rate of return on investment as possible, in order to
encourage uptake. Commercial student loans just don't work as a means
of getting children from poor families into the higher education system
(at least as far as UK experience indicates, where there's a strong
working-class tradition of refusing to take out loans), so paying (and
collecting replayments) via the tax system is one solution that ultimately
rebounds to the good of the public by increasing the proportion of
graduates and highly employable people.
... And there you have it. That's what I think government is good
for: universal healthcare, subsidized education, insurance of last resort,
public arts policies, libraries, planning, road-building. All derived from
first principles. (Do I need to emphasize the point that I Am Not
A Libertarian?)
There is, however, a difference between, say, paying for education and
dictating the educational syllabus, or between underwriting healthcare
and making people piss in a bottle at work to prove that they haven't
been taking substances that the ideologues in power disapprove of.
(Government's job as seen from the viewpoint of the citizen, like that of
good corporate management as seen from the perspective of the employees,
should be to be invisible until you need help -- then to make exactly
the right sort of help available, without inviting itself into your living
room or office cubicle and poking around in the rubbish. It's not big
government that I'm afraid of: it's *intrusive* government.)
-- Charlie
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