Learn from history
The more I watch what goes on in politics, the more I realize what the phrase "learn from history" means. It seems so obvious once you see the patterns, but they are like those hidden pictures that you have to study with eyes half-closed until the image suddenly materializes from the busy background.
How tedious a subject, you think. Yes, except that knowledge of what went before provides you with the tools to defend yourself. In particular is the ever-present but often invisible conflict between your individual interests and the permanent political establishment (at any level, from the front office of your child's elementary school to the neighborhood association to the town council to any Federal Department).
Look, for instance, at local government. If you live in several places over your lifetime, you come to realize the contempt in which taxpayers are held by the permanent local government. Its interest is to expand, period. It expands its take in taxes and it expands its encroachment on private industry and services.
Citizens discover the issues as they become adults in the community. What they don't realize is that the government has heard it all before, from prior generations of taxpayers. Well-reasoned arguments are unpersuasive, ignored, by the permanent government. They have zero incentive to respond (except those who must get re-elected.) They have well-practiced responses to each new wave of objections.
Business columnists write well-reasoned essays supporting lower taxes, smaller government, reduced regulation. Newspapers receive letters to the editor opposing proposed tax increases. Citizens attend local government council meetings protesting property tax, millage rate or assessment increases. Year after year, people argue their case against growth of government and taxes, thinking they are breaking new ground. Year after year, the efforts fail.
Permanent government rebuffs these efforts at every turn. They are practiced and adept at this response. It is startling and revealing, in fact, how uniform the response is from government entities wherever you go. They argue that they need the tax revenues to provide all the services taxpayers demand. They cannot make do with lower numbers. If a reduction does come to pass, they consistently reduce the most visible services first - fire and police, library, trash collection etc. Never a reduction in overhead, staff size, salaries and benefits.
In Florida, for example, the recently ended hot real estate market drove up property values to such a degree that property tax revenues increased about 40%. This windfall level of revenue immediately became the baseline from which the government could not "afford" to retreat without grievous harm to the public (see above). In Fairfax County, Virginia, where there is no cap on property tax increases on homes, these taxes increased 60% during this same hot real estate market, about 20% a year.
In a fight over adding a little neighborhood to the government garbage collection rolls (taking it away from the robust private service companies), the local government council significantly bent the rules in order to add the tiny neighborhood to its territory. Once done, it could not be reversed because it became part of a very large area which would all have to agree at once to revert to private service. Government made regulations that strongly favored their own power. The point of this anecdote is that it turned out this issue of government encroachment on the private trash collection industry was also being fought in several other communities across the country. A national advocacy group was involved in these battles in the interest of defending private rights. Had this small neighborhood been aware that others were engaged in the same fight, they would have had better and stronger tools to support them.
Citizens need a national perspective on encroaching government and a national response to it. Local protests generally fail because they are pusillanimous in comparison to the entrenched and practiced permanent establishment. Knowledge is power.
How tedious a subject, you think. Yes, except that knowledge of what went before provides you with the tools to defend yourself. In particular is the ever-present but often invisible conflict between your individual interests and the permanent political establishment (at any level, from the front office of your child's elementary school to the neighborhood association to the town council to any Federal Department).
Look, for instance, at local government. If you live in several places over your lifetime, you come to realize the contempt in which taxpayers are held by the permanent local government. Its interest is to expand, period. It expands its take in taxes and it expands its encroachment on private industry and services.
Citizens discover the issues as they become adults in the community. What they don't realize is that the government has heard it all before, from prior generations of taxpayers. Well-reasoned arguments are unpersuasive, ignored, by the permanent government. They have zero incentive to respond (except those who must get re-elected.) They have well-practiced responses to each new wave of objections.
Business columnists write well-reasoned essays supporting lower taxes, smaller government, reduced regulation. Newspapers receive letters to the editor opposing proposed tax increases. Citizens attend local government council meetings protesting property tax, millage rate or assessment increases. Year after year, people argue their case against growth of government and taxes, thinking they are breaking new ground. Year after year, the efforts fail.
Permanent government rebuffs these efforts at every turn. They are practiced and adept at this response. It is startling and revealing, in fact, how uniform the response is from government entities wherever you go. They argue that they need the tax revenues to provide all the services taxpayers demand. They cannot make do with lower numbers. If a reduction does come to pass, they consistently reduce the most visible services first - fire and police, library, trash collection etc. Never a reduction in overhead, staff size, salaries and benefits.
In Florida, for example, the recently ended hot real estate market drove up property values to such a degree that property tax revenues increased about 40%. This windfall level of revenue immediately became the baseline from which the government could not "afford" to retreat without grievous harm to the public (see above). In Fairfax County, Virginia, where there is no cap on property tax increases on homes, these taxes increased 60% during this same hot real estate market, about 20% a year.
In a fight over adding a little neighborhood to the government garbage collection rolls (taking it away from the robust private service companies), the local government council significantly bent the rules in order to add the tiny neighborhood to its territory. Once done, it could not be reversed because it became part of a very large area which would all have to agree at once to revert to private service. Government made regulations that strongly favored their own power. The point of this anecdote is that it turned out this issue of government encroachment on the private trash collection industry was also being fought in several other communities across the country. A national advocacy group was involved in these battles in the interest of defending private rights. Had this small neighborhood been aware that others were engaged in the same fight, they would have had better and stronger tools to support them.
Citizens need a national perspective on encroaching government and a national response to it. Local protests generally fail because they are pusillanimous in comparison to the entrenched and practiced permanent establishment. Knowledge is power.
posted by alison @ 10:02 AM
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