INVISIBLE GIFTS, PART II
by Marylaine Block
In last week's issue <http://marylaine.com/exlibris/xlib304.html> I talked about the invisible gifts we take for granted on the internet, all the free content that nonetheless costs somebody time and money to place there. This week, I'd like to talk about the other important invisible gifts, all the works of government (though I generally think of them as not so much free as pre-paid).
These works are so much a precondition of our daily lives that we assume their existence, in the same way we assume there will be ground beneath our feet and air to breathe and water to drink. So it doesn't occur to us that governments in fact PUT that ground beneath our feet and wheels, in the form of sidewalks and roads and bridges, that governments make sure our air is pure and breathable, and create dams and purification plants to bring clean water to us. It does not occur to us that in many parts of the world, clean water is not available at all, and that people may spend hours each day trudging to a polluted water source to carry back the day's supply.
What government provides us is the underprinnings for everything else: for our economy, our health, and our protection against predators. What this requires is public officials who assess our needs, both for the present and for the future, and plan and finance systems and structures that will meet those needs.
It's fashionable these days to say that anything government can do, private enterprise can do better. But businesses that answer to the demands for ever bigger quarterly profits cannot do the kind of long- term thinking that public infrastructure requires, and companies that exist to provide a limited range of products and services cannot think broadly enough to accommodate society-wide needs. Individual power companies, for example, must think about their own profits, not about developing and maintaining the power grid which every power company in the country depends on.
In fact, businesses could not themselves exist without government infrastructure in place: a legal infrastructure that protects business contracts and intellectual property; a transportation infrastructure that enables them to deliver products and services; an educational infrastructure that provides educated workers; a public health infrastructure that protects the lives of employers and employees alike (traffic accidents and unsafe food and water can affect any of us, after all); an information structure, composed of libraries, government-funded research, government-gathered statistics, and the internet, whichs create new knowledge and enables the development of entirely new products and businesses.
Having put those systems in place, it is incumbent on government to maintain them. Governments are in no way required to build dams, for example. But once they have built dams, they are morally obliged to inspect, repair, and replace them when faults appear, because if they do not, the people who live below those dams will be in mortal danger if they collapse. It's a simple rule: if you create a hazard, you must constantly monitor it and prevent it from taking lives.
And as we have just been forcefully reminded, when governments build bridges, they are obligated to keep them from falling down.
My father was a city planner, so the people I grew up among were nice, middle-aged politicians and officials who took care of all the boring details of government. They built and maintained roads and put in traffic lights, so that people could have access to new businesses and housing developments. They wrote and enforced fire and housing codes, inspected restaurants, made sure our water was disease-free, and hired police and firefighters and public health workers to maintain our physical safety. They created, maintained and financed the city's water supply and the sewer lines beneath the city. They built and maintained our schools and libraries and parks and museums to create both an educated workforce and a community people would enjoy living in.
In every case, once these responsible public servants determined what needed to be done and what it would cost, they figured out how to pay for it. They prepared bond issues, and spent countless hours in public meetings explaining why the projects were necessary and defending the need for the tax increase.
Citizens grumbled about the taxes, of course. But they paid them, because these officials convinced them that the economic health of the city and state and nation depended on good infrastructure. Our western states as we now know them couldn't have existed without the billions of federal tax dollars that provided their water. Our thriving interstate and global commerce couldn't have developed if our governments 60 years ago had not invested billions in developing interstate highways and waterways. Next time you travel through Connecticut and Massachusets (some of the most highly taxed property in the world), pay attention to the staggering number of bridges you cross, and you will understand how much the state economies depend on the taxes that maintain this enormous public investment.
I'm not sure what happened to all those nice, middle-aged politicians and officials who were willing to do the boring, day to day work of planning, building, and maintaining, like so many little Dutch boys grown up but still holding their fingers in the dike.
Someplace along the way these conscientious leaders seem to have been replaced by politicians who will do anything to avoid paying or raising taxes, officials who are happy to live off public investments made by their predecessors but unwilling to maintain them, let alone make similar investments on behalf of future generations. They are eating our seed corn, and there will be nothing left when they are finished.
I once wrote a column suggesting one way to make the invisible gifts of government visible: to hold a No Government Day <http://marylaine.com/myword/nogov.html>, or even a week, during which no government employee would come to work. I admitted that people would die as a result, which would be unfortunate.
But so will people who are crossing our crumbling infrastructure when it collapses, unaware that it was dangerously under-maintained because public officials were irresponsible.
Maybe it will take the deaths of innocents to shock us into realizing that there are worse things than paying taxes. And that our lives, our economy, our health, and our future depend on the invisible gifts provided by conscientious public officials using tax dollars wisely.
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COOL QUOTE:
Sharing is under siege. It is the sworn enemy of the global market - which is why so much of international trade law is designed to criminalize sharing.
Naomi Klein, "Why Being a Librarian is a Radical Choice." An address to the Joint American Library Association/Canadian Library Association Conference, June 24 2003. http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Articles7/Klein_Librarian.htm
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