Consider the 1977 words of late economics Nobel-laureate James Buchanan:
“Government is often declared to be the only reliable supplier of ‘public goods.’ This declaration is far more aspirational than it is empirical. In fact, government too often undermines the provision of public goods, even as it does so in the name of supplying public goods.”
As Buchanan, awarded the Nobel in 1986 for his work in public choice theory and who died in 2013, further reminded:
“A premise of many, if not all, of those who admire a ‘vigorous’ or ‘activist’ state”(what today would be called “progressivism”) “is that such a state can ‘remake’ society — can by design and state action ‘change the world’ for the good.
“Such hubris is dangerous,” Buchanan cautioned. “An uncertain regime of rules, one always subject to change based on changes in political personnel or on political manias, is a public bad.”
We see such hubris all around us and these days it is the rule rather than the exception.
Consider: The badly broken Pittsburgh Water and Sewer Authority appears to be rebuffing multiple entreaties from the private sector to invest in the PWSA and to turn it from the moribund public utility long on the verge of collapse into something functional.
While under “reform” terms, the authority now will answer to the state Public Utility Commission, it appears politicians who have vowed to remove politics from the agency’s oversight continue to play politics with the public’s welfare.
Consider: City of Pittsburgh and Allegheny County officials continue to refuse to release specifics of the monetary bid they submitted to lure Amazon to establish a new headquarters here.
Despite a state Office of Open Records ruling that such information indeed is public and must be released, the ruling is being appealed – using public money to keep public information secret.
With great hubris, the “private” entity created to formulate the proffer of public resources, PGHQ2, promises that “if the Pittsburgh region is selected by Amazon, and a deal is reached on what incentives will be offered, anything that involves government funds will go through a robust, public process as the legislative bodies do their due diligence.”
Perhaps “hubris” was too weak a word.
Continued the PGHQ2 statement: “There will be every opportunity for the public to weigh on those proposals and to have their voice heard.”
After the deal is cut. Really?
Consider: A new book documents how government eschews the free market to keep people dependent on government. And it involves the shale gas revolution that has done so much to boost economies near and far.
To wit, as Stephen Moore and Kathleen Hartnett White recount in “Fueling Freedom,” the explosion in shale gas has lowered the price of natural gas by about two-thirds. That, in turn, has led to large savings in home heating costs.
“We calculated the benefits to poor households from these lower prices and estimated that shale gas results in $10 billion in consumer savings each year. The annual budget for the LIHEAP (the Low Income Energy Assistance) program is about $3 billion. So shale gas is saving poor families three times what LIHEAP does,” they say.
“Yet the left-wing politicians who say how shameful it is to cut energy assistance are the ones who want America to stop producing shale gas by banning fracking and other modern drilling technologies that makes natural gas so cheap.”
“Beneficent” government. Secrecy. Purporting to have the public welfare at heart. In the name of providing a “public good.” And the result? All too often, sadly and predictably, James Buchanan’s “public bad.”
Colin McNickle is a senior fellow and media specialist at the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy (cmcnickle@alleghenyinstitute.org).
