Yes, How Do We Best Help the Poor?

When I drive to the gym in Seattle's Ballard / Ship Canal commercial neighborhood, I notice that many of the businesses have blocked off the street parking with concrete Jersey Barriers. The Jersey Barriers are put there to discourage the homeless from camping there.

Yes. The homeless. What Do We Do about the homeless?

And whatabout the drug epidemic, in general: fentanyl, etc.?

And is the current Democratic plan -- headlined by President Biden in his SOTU March 1, 2022 -- for more government assistance for child-care, pre-K, and health care a good idea?

I mean by this, do these kinds of services benefit Americans in the long term?

Then, I read, the 20,000 aides and staffers in Congress are thinking of forming a labor union. Yes, how has gubmint employee unions worked out so far, sports fans?

And let us leave the question of private-sector labor unions alone, even though my feeling is that labor unions typically thrive in an economic downturn when workers resist pay-cuts from their employers that are, of course, desperately trying to keep their businesses afloat.

See, I think that, probably, the huge amount of monies collected and handed out by government is a terrible idea.

Oh yes, partly because all government spending is a flat out distribution of loot and plunder to regime supporters.

But also because We the People should be doing most of the stuff that government does, on our own time and out of our own pockets, from education, to helping the poor, to dealing with the homeless.

And health care! Supposing health care was run by a combination of Amazon and church ladies?

Or. Suppose health care was organized the same way as auto repair?

And unions. See, I think that unions give people the idea that they have lifetime jobs. Sorry: ain't no such thing. That's what happened to the white working class. They had Good Jobs at Good Wages until all of a sudden, they didn't. Part of that was that government-regulated employer-worker relationships had helped unions bid labor rates way above market. Part of that was that workers comfortably fluffed up in a union job don't feel the need to keep their skills up to date.

Education? I don't know what kids should be learning today, and how they should be doing it, but I do know that when the government schools are all invested in renaming schools and critical race theory training, then Houston We Have a Problem.

Oh yes. Then there's the Science™. All the fashionable people know that the latest thing is "emergence." The world doesn't work by top-down administration but by creative "emergence" of new ideas and techniques and social and economic relationships.

But when so many things are administered as government programs, there is no opportunity for "emergence" to emerge. Did I mention my Four Laws?

Socialism cannot work because it cannot compute prices (Mises). 

The administrative state cannot work because the Man in Washington does not have the bandwidth to run the economy (Hayek). 

Regulation does not work because “regulatory capture” (Stigler). 

Government programs cannot work because you can never reform them (Chantrill).

This is not rocket science. 

Here in America we have the white working class dying of despair. We have black "aspiring rappers" stealing and shooting each other and spongeing off baby-mamas. We have the educated elite swanking around in credentialed sinecures. And we have government with a debt of way over 100 percent of GDP.

Something's got to give.