Great fiction
A ROTA hotel shut down months ago without, apparently, the central government’s knowledge. This is now a “major issue” because the government is owed money by the hotel owner. Based on the statements made by certain officials, it seems that they believe the government could have collected payments from a tourism-related business establishment on an island where the tourism industry is all but dead. Perhaps some officials also expected that the government could have “done something” to prevent the hotel’s closure.
The list of government failures throughout recorded human history is long and dreary and seemingly never ending, but many elected officials — and most voters — continue to cling to the thoroughly discredited notion that government is an all-knowing entity that “solves problems,” including those created by previous government “solutions.”
In reality, as French economist Frederic Bastiat (1801-1850) would put it, government “is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else.”
Behind any popular (because generous) government program or initiative is not an enlightened official, but public funds generated by a thriving economy. The CNMI’s “good ‘ol days” in the late 1980s to the mid-1990s were financed by a rapidly growing economy. The CARES Act and ARPA were bankrolled by the world’s largest and most dynamic economy. Ditto the U.S. and the CNMI’s robust response to Covid-19 and other disasters.
Government takes other people’s money, squanders most of it while handing some to voters, and then gets all the credit for its generosity — with other people’s money.
Always in business
PERHAPS some officials are baffled that a business hemorrhaging money has ceased operation — instead of spending money it doesn’t have, and hiring more employees it doesn’t need. Which is how government usually operates.
Government, to paraphrase Kevin D. Williamson, is the Immortal Corporation. “You’ll never see a capitol building with a GOING OUT OF BUSINESS sign hanging out front — even genuinely bankrupt, undeniably insolvent political regimes from Argentina to Greece for the most part go on about their business, even after defaulting on their financial obligations.”
Government never goes out of business.
And so, to quote Herbert Spencer, “while every day chronicles a [government] failure, there every day reappears the belief that it needs but [legislation] and a staff of [government] officers to effect any end desired.”
And yet, Williamson said, if “there were self-evident [government] solutions to…sticky problems, they probably would be implemented. Nobody wants untreated schizophrenics on the streets, and nobody profits from it. Nobody wants underperforming schools… — businesses profit from highly skilled workers and consumers with disposable income, not from ignorance, unemployment and unproductivity. Nobody wants babies [to] suffer…and go without care. There is no profit in that. The endurance of such problems suggests that there is rather more to solving them than our glib political certainties can accommodate.”
But don’t tell that to elected officials. Or voters.
