Monday, November 05, 2007
The wrong incentives
The key to having a society in which we would want seems to be to have incentives that promote self-reliance and freedom, not knowing how to take handouts from the Government. The whole, failed Socialist experiment tried to teach people to want and accept money and services from the Government. The motivation was idealistic: to help the people who could not care for themselves and to have a better life for everyone. The problem was that without productive people producing and creating products, services, and wealth, there would be little to give away. The assumption was that the good things would be created by someone so that the Government could take some or most of them away. Through hard lessons from the looters, and continued denial that they were really happening, we finally tried a new system. Let people keep what they earned. Ask them to purchase the services needed to maintain a country and provide for common needs. The changes were tried in small pieces and then we would go back to the ways that didn't work. Finally, after we experienced the "terrorist" nuclear attack, we gradually came to our senses.
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Yeah, It was amazing how much more efficient things became when the people providing the services had a "stake" in making it profitable. The market weeded out those who didn't provide adequate services, it also weeded out those services that were too expensive and/or inefficient. Things that were viable in Metropolises weren't in the rural areas and we got over the erroneous thought that everyone had to have the same thing. The maglev system that runs the Northeastern Megalopolis isn't viable in Montana and they still rely on "manual" highways for the most part.
Gramps told me that when he was young, the government spent 10 million dollars in his county to pave roads nobody lived on or should have been considered private drives. That kind of thinking would be insanity, now.
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