Via HotAir, this howler from Nicholas Kristof:
But when many Republicans insist on “starving the beast” of government, cutting taxes, regulations and social services — slashing everything but the military — well, those are steps toward Pakistan.
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The long trajectory of history has been for governments to take on more responsibilities, and for citizens to pay more taxes.
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I spend a fair amount of time reporting in developing countries, from Congo to Colombia. They’re typically characterized by minimal taxes, high levels of inequality, free-wheeling businesses and high military expenditures. Any of that ring a bell?
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Do we really aspire to take a step in the direction of a low-tax laissez-faire Eden …like Pakistan
All that’s missing from Kristof’s risible column is an assertion that minarchists want to do away with roads.
This is another sad example of what we libertarians tend to think of as the “Somalia fallacy” — the ridiculous notion that anarchies lacking rule of law are somehow comparable to limited government. It’s an argument left-liberals didn’t dare to make as often before the late 1990s, because up until that point the “The long trajectory of history… for governments to take on more responsibilities, and for citizens to pay more taxes” had Communism as its logical endpoint, and for most Americans the Soviets were still clearly in mind as an evil empire of repression and poverty — and Kristof seems to forget that the Soviet Union’s collapse was a dramatic reversal of that long trajectory.
Factually, of course, the notion that Pakistan, the Congo, Colombia, or Somalia are any kind of paradise of limited government is deeply ridiculous. They all rank near the bottom of the Freedom House rankings, and as DeSoto pointed out some time ago, poor countries tend to be poor because they lack property rights, not government. This is just as true of Somalia as it is of North Korea or Cuba (which no one can accuse of being insufficiently burdened with government), as well as poor African countries, or Mideast national-socialist regimes like Egypt or Syria. China’s growth can largely be explained by precisely the sort of reduction in government Kristof bemoans here in America — a Communist state began to allow private markets to replace a state-run economy, and the result was increased prosperity for all.
Kristof might also be interested to know that his social-democracy poster boy Sweden has had school choice for some time, and underwent a series of free-market reforms in the 1990s, which continue today. Oops.
It should be obvious in any case that in none of the countries Kristof cites could the problems be solved with more government: the main reason very poor countries don’t have much government is the same reason the USA didn’t have much government until the 20th century got rolling along — societies at near-subsistence are just too poor to support a civil class and/or welfare state. This is why in 1901 the USA did not have a fifth of the country on food stamps or another fifth on Social Security and Medicare — we weren’t less compassionate, we just couldn’t afford such luxuries at a time when even middle-class Americans could expect to go hungry now and then (as opposed to the modern-day obesity crisis of the poor).
Kristof also wails and gnashes his teeth at our “growing inequality” — another liberal bogeyman, but another one that’s largely mythical as most of that change was just a shift from corporate income to personal, brought about by changes in the tax code. If leftists want to “reduce income inequality” by most common measures, we could do that most easily by lowering corporate taxes — though one doubts they would applaud the result.
Of course, the whole premise of complaints about inequality is suspect: why is income equality desirable as an end in itself? Do we really expect every person to be equally productive? Some people make earning a high income a priority in their lives, others do not. The results of attempts to create societies of equal income have been, shall we say, a bit disappointing. Here in the U.S., every year the top 1% transfer a massive portion of their income to the bottom 50% through the income tax, but apparently this penance for their sin of being productive is insufficient for Kristof, who presumably won’t be happy until everyone has their “fair share” regardless of whether they lift a finger in productive service to society (as measured by the propensity of others to engage in voluntary exchanges of value with them).