The Government Succesfully Supplies Boogers

A close friend of mine picks her nose a lot.  One time, when I was giving her a hard time about it, she claimed that she suffered from an actual condition...the overproduction of boogers.  I was skeptical...to say the least.

More and more I'm convinced that liberals truly and honestly believe that the government very successfully supplies boogers.  This allows them to claim that the government succeeds where the market fails...and also helps to explain their reluctance to allow taxpayers to choose which government organizations they give their taxes to.  Because they must understand that taxpayers would certainly boycott the government out of existence if boogers were the only thing that it supplied.  

Do you catch my drift?  You can't say that government supplies things that people actually value, want and need...and then turn around and argue that taxpayers would not choose to spend their taxes on things that they actually value, want and need.  Taxes wouldn't be voluntary...taxpayers would have to spend their taxes anyways...so why wouldn't they choose to spend their taxes on public goods that they value?  It just doesn't follow.

Neither the private sector nor the public sector has a monopoly on failure.  But who cares if the market fails at supplying things that nobody really wants more of?  Nobody cares that the market fails at supplying more boogers.  Is that what the public sector is truly there for?  To successfully supply things that nobody really wants more of?

That's why I love pragmatarianism.  Nothing more effectively forces liberals to supply non sequiturs.  Eh, well...I guess that's more like a positive externality.  I love pragmatarianism because I love the thought of the government actually supplying things that taxpayers would choose to sacrifice a portion of their lives for.  Because as Henry David Thoreau said, "The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it."

We don't have a scarcity of boogers...and people have absolutely no use for boogers...so why would people choose to exchange a portion of their lives for more boogers?  They obviously wouldn't.  So what would they choose to exchange a portion of their lives for?  Would they be willing to exchange a portion of their lives for more public education...more public healthcare...more national defense...more public transportation...more environmental protection?  Who knows...but what I do know for certain is that we all want more for less.

If you don't want more for less then please paypal me $100 and I'll paypal you $1 in return.  Hah...that would show me.  But the fact that we all want more for less helps us understand why producers are motivated to do more with less.  Doing more with less is known as "resourcefulness".  Being resourceful is how we overcome scarcity.  But overcoming scarcity only has any value...merit...meaning...when you're providing an abundance of something that other people would choose to exchange a portion of their lives for.

Do we want the government to use our lives to provide an abundance of things that we don't actually value?  Hell no.  Absofuckinglutely not.  Our lives are too short for that nonsense.  If you want an abundance of the things you actually value...then you'll allow taxpayers to choose more for less in the public sector.  This will strongly motivate government organizations to do more with less.  Therefore, we'll end up with more public goods for less taxes.

Reply to Paul Krugman

Here's a comment I posted in reply to Paul Krugman over at the New York Times...

The primary failure of the market is that, because of the free-rider problem, there is little financial incentive to produce public goods.  The primary failure of the government is that planners only have access to a microscopic percentage of the information available to society as a whole.

So you and your opponents can go round and round perusing the horizon like that fellow in the Stephen Crane poem...or you can both make some basic concessions.

Conservatives will concede that taxes are necessary and you'll concede that donations to government organizations should be 100% tax deductible.  This idea is known as pragmatarianism.  Kind of like how Deng Xiaoping said that he didn't care whether the cat was black or white...what mattered was whether it caught mice.

Forcing taxpayers to consider the opportunity costs of their individual taxes is the only way to ensure that limited public resources are allocated as efficiently as possible.  It's also the only way to ensure that government organizations will operate as efficiently as possible.  Plus, it's the only way that taxpayers will ever be happy about paying taxes.

What's so strange is that both liberals and conservatives believe that congress is somehow uniquely qualified to allocate public resources.  They seem to forget that congress only has this job because nearly 1000 years ago they fired the king and quickly filled the vacancy.

It was admittedly a very liberal move for them to have done so.  Likewise, it will be a very liberal move when control of taxes is passed from congress to taxpayers themselves. Not sure if any event in the past 100 years could be considered more "progressive".

Next time you talk to your buddy Obama...please offer pragmatarianism as an example of something that qualifies as legitimate and genuine "change". We're tired of all this hyperpartisan obstructionism and would like to have a real opportunity to directly support the government organizations that we value.