“The nine most terrifying words in the English language are, 'I'm from the government and I'm here to help.'” - Ronald Reagan
I wonder if this still holds true along the East coast this week? Hurricane Irene killed 44 people and caused massive flooding. The United States has suffered $55,000,000,000 in damages from natural disasters this year.
I suspect the victims of these disasters won’t be on Fox news complaining that the government did too much to help them. I expect they’ll just complain that what help they recived wasn’t the help that they needed. The positive stories won’t be about FEMA coming to the rescue it will be about neighbors helping neighbors.
They always are.
The issue at work here is that government has become too big, too impersonal. Our populations are too big. No one can efficiently manage the needs of 30 million diverse people (much less 300 million) in diverse situations. No one can even understand the needs of most of the people in a group that size in so many different situations. While some praise the economy of scale for it’s efficiencies those efficiencies don’t seem to apply when diversity is involved.
It's the same type of problems created with mega farms. Mega farms give us cheap food but at a price not measured in dollars. That price is the natural security provided by biological diversity - the system that has allowed life to flourish on earth for about 2 billion years. Monoculture creates it's own problems. Most of which we try to solve with science but those "solutions" just create new problems. I suppose if you are one of the few who make your living profiting from these "solutions" to the inefficiency of nature that's great. But what about the rest of us?
For most of us the short term costs associated with smaller, more local, everything are more than likely worth the long term benefits. Unfortunately we live in a system that focuses on the short term (4-5 years) and the grand scale (national) and the people running it don't seem keen on change. The Alpha's want the Deltas to just eat their corn and like it.
Small and local can work, it did for a long time. It's only real enemy is greed.
1 comment:
This post has been bugging me, but given I agree with many of your points, I'm not quite sure why. I think it's the last line. Small and local worked, yeh. But infant mortality was through the roof and life expectancy was 45. Sadly, this is still the case in many parts of the world. Some of them places where local isn't always an option. Like, say, when it doesn't rain for a really long time. I know the counter point is that maybe that's just how it's meant to be. But, for me that's an idea that's just too sad to accept. Bigger may not be better, but maybe local isn't always enough?
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