My Word's Worth: a weekly column by Marylaine Block

vol. 3 #11, September 12, 1997

GIVE ME LIBERTY

You know, I think there's something about the intellectual free-for-all of the web that attracts libertarians. Or maybe it's that a lot of webheads, being good with computers and having this overriding curiosity about how systems work (even if those systems are not, properly speaking, THEIR systems to poke around in), are kind of natural outlaws. There's also the fact that our government to date has been remarkably ham-fisted in its dealings with the net and its citizens--when it moves in and puts a Steve Jackson out of business, it creates a certain distrust among the computer literati. When it tries to say the first amendment doesn't apply to us on the net, it creates outrage.

In any case, it's clear that many of you on the web are libertarians. And my reaction, as it is so often, is "Well, yes, BUT..." I can understand being offended with the doings of politicians--I'm not much impressed with our current lot. But I also know that politicians are not really the government. They are merely the VISIBLE government.

I know that the steady increase in our longevity owes far more to the work of our invisible government--clean water, sewer systems, required vaccinations, inspected meat, the control of epidemics, and the spread of emergency medical services--than to any of the wonders of high tech medicine. You see, I grew up around people who were part of this invisible government, the people who provided all the services that are the basic underpinning of our lives. My father and his friends planned for the growth and safety of cities, writing housing codes and public health regulations, and I know what happens when you don't have them.

I know that every rule a government writes is an attempt to prevent the repetition of some disaster caused by greed or ignorance or stupidity. Fire codes were developed as a result of the Triangle Shirtwaist Company fire; they were made more stringent in schools after so many children and nuns died at Our Lady of Angels school. On the news, from time to time, you will hear about buildings in other countries collapsing, but rarely in this country, because we have a better system of building codes and inspection. During Hurricane Andrew, the houses that survived relatively undamaged were the ones that met code.

I know that bad government can cause disaster or make it worse. Houston now floods regularly, not because the weather has changed, but because its government didn't require developers to provide alternative drainage when they covered up the thirsty earth with asphalt.

I also know that we have one of the safest air transport systems in the world, because the government checks the pilots' competence, requires regular maintenance of the planes, and provides air traffic controllers to make sure planes don't run into each other. I don't count on it to keep on being as safe, though. Because of airline deregulation, funding for inspection has been cut back at the same time that marginal airlines with too little cash on hand and too many bills to pay have been cutting back on maintenance and pilot training.

Libertarians place a lot of faith in the free market to solve all human problems, but the free market includes a lot of con men and cheats and people who will cut corners if need be to meet the bills. The reason government provides social insurance and protects pensions and savings accounts is that too many hardworking people saved their money and lost it all to schemers and overly optimistic bankers. It's interesting to hear TV reporters worry about the UPS workers' pension funds being in the hands of the Teamsters--it's clear the reporters don't remember all the companies that have stolen or misinvested their workers' pension funds.

We have asked government to take care of the things that belong to all of us, that we cannot survive without--our air and water, our ecology from which you cannot subtract one thing without changing everything else. Unfettered individual choice is all very well, but the collective result of individual choices can be devastating. It's one thing for one person to dump sewage into the river, and quite another when several hundred thousand people do that. If one person kills a passenger pigeon, the species survives--but if thousands of people shoot hundreds of thousands of passenger pigeons, it does not. One of the great unheralded successes of government is the massive cleanup of waterways once so polluted that they caught on fire.

Another unheralded success of government is inclusion. Now we take it for granted that of course public buildings will have wheelchair ramps--just as for years we took it for granted that public buildings had sweeping marble staircases, and never thought to ask how handicapped people could make their way up those stairs. The one minority that all of us could join with no advance notice has gained a voice and a presence in our civic affairs because government made us do the right thing.

If we went along with the libertarians and took away government's power to regulate and control, we would only change the name of the players who DO have that power. It would migrate into the hands of the multinational corporations, now engaged in buying each other up at extraordinary rates, and well on their way to becoming one giant megacorporation, manufacturer of everything, provider of all services. Libertarians especially should feel well and truly threatened by the decline in the number of voices in major media, which are in the process of becoming one giant Disney-Murdoch-Turner-Time-Warner media opinion straitjacket.

I can understand libertarians feeling they can live their lives better without the benefit of politicians and those occasional overly officious bureaucrats who are the only part of government they really see. I can absolutely understand them not wanting their taxes to support Newt Gingrich or Bill Clinton. But if our libertarians vote to cut our taxes, and thus the government, these are NOT the people who will be out of work--they will make sure THEY keep on drawing their salaries.

What will more likely get starved is the Centers for Disease Control, so that when the next plague comes along, there won't be anybody on hand to find the cure. We may lose student loans, public hospitals, cancer research, dam and bridge inspectors, weather satellites, air traffic controllers, money for roads and schools and libraries. We may end up with fewer prison guards, fewer books for the blind, fewer trauma centers. There will be fewer prosecutions of companies that dump arsenic in our groundwater, make dangerous products, or force employees to work in dangerous sweatshop conditions.

That's why I worry about libertarians. I'm not sure all of them understand what the invisible government has done for them, and what they'll lose if they kill it. Perhaps they do know, and they don't mind losing those protections. But you see, the rest of us would lose them too.

And yet for all that, I have been arguing with libertarians who are extremely well informed and thoughtful, and I find they have a clearer understanding than most of us that a government strong enough to protect so many aspects of our lives is also strong enough to strangle our freedom, and that government untended becomes power hungry and stupid. So next week I'd like to talk about the very real abuses of government--and why we need to start paying attention.

NOTE: My thinking is always a work in progress. You could mentally insert all my columns in between these two sentences: "This is something I've been thinking about," and "Does this make any sense to you?" I welcome your thoughts. Please send your comments about these columns to: marylaine at netexpress.net. Since I've written a lot of these, some of them many years ago, help me out by telling me which column you're referring to.

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