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The Third-World-ization of the USA

By: RJ Eskow on Sunday, August 27th, 2006

You hear the comment all the time, from people on both sides of the political fence, that it seems as if the United States’ basic structure and service capability has declined - that "things are going to hell in a handbasket." They’ll make vague complaints that "nothing works anymore," or that things have degraded to a "Third World level" (meaning the level of a country that lacks the resources to maintain its basic functionality.)

Well, it turns out that they’re right:

The American Society of Civil Engineers last year graded the nation "D" for its overall infrastructure conditions, estimating that it would take $1.6 trillion over five years to fix the problem.

The results include leaking pipelines, failed air traffic control systems in major metropolitan areas, and - in an eye-opener - a power failure that paralyzed the NSA. American citizens are at risk for bridge failures and other life-threatening disasters.

The Society’s director adds:

"I thought [Hurricane] Katrina was a hell of a wake-up call, but people are missing the alarm."

Another analyst observes:

"If a terrorist group were able to knock the NSA offline, or disrupt one of the nation’s busiest airports, or shut down the most important oil pipeline in the nation, the impact would be perceived as devastating. And yet we’ve essentially let these things happen — or almost happen — to ourselves."

One function of government is to ensure that its citizens have a safe and functional physical environment. The problem is that we have a political movement in power that doesn’t believe in government. They would rather "drown it in a bathbub" - or in the Ninth Ward.

...

The Commission on Public Infrastructure at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank, said in a recent report that facilities are deteriorating "at an alarming rate."

It noted that half the 257 locks operated by the Army Corps of Engineers on inland waterways are functionally obsolete, more than one-quarter of the nation's bridges are structurally deficient or obsolete, and $11 billion is needed annually to replace aging drinking-water facilities.

LINK

How much are we giving to, I mean paying, Halliburton for both Iraq and Katrina again? Too bad this administration thinks giving tax dollars to their buddies is more important than actually fulfilling it's responsibilities. (Of course, that insures they'll have primo jobs when they get out of office. Or is that a bribe?)

It's called public choice theory, and it applies to all rulers, governments, and political factions.

The public choice theory totally discounts the motives of the people who made those misused laws in the first place. It is based on a theory of human behavior that discounts both the efforts of people working in "charitable" groups for the betterment of various social and economic ills and also attributes more than apparent enlightenment and discrimination on the part of the general masses. If self-interest were the motivating factor of the folks in KS, Sam Brownback would never have won a primary, much less an election.

Barbara wrote:The public choice theory totally discounts the motives of the people who made those misused laws in the first place.

??? I would say the opposite: Public choice theory, unlike the conventional naive assumptions that politicians act for the "common good" and voters vote wisely, correctly stresses the motives of the political actors. Do you know what public choice theory is? Did you read the article describing it?

What "misused laws" are you referring to above? Perhaps if you tell me I can explain the self-interest involved in getting them passed.

The remainder of your post indicates to me that you may be misunderstanding the term "self-interest" in the current context. It refers, not to some objective rational self-interest, but to subjective self-interest. E.g. The fact that a lobby is a "charitable group" does not imply that they do not tend to act in their self-interest as they see it. It merely means that their self-interest is interpreted wrt their group - passing laws or taxes to help the disabled, people with AIDS, or save the world from the devil, environmental apocalypse, or demon rum.

Similarly, it is strange that you would claim that public choice theory "attributes more than apparent enlightenment and discrimination on the part of the general masses" when, on the contrary, it gave us the concept of "rational ignorance" and its connection to voting behavior. Again, it seems to me you are mistakenly using "self-interest" in some objective rather than the subjective economic sense.