Consider this adage, from writer Carl Shirky:
Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.
Now, consider the laundry list of social problems that have lingered for decades, despite the best efforts of big government, advocacy groups, and public-interest lobbies.
The word “despite,” if Shirky is right, should be replaced by “because.”
Is he right? To seek an answer, lets look at four major societal problems.
We are more than a half century into the twin Wars on Poverty and Drugs. In that same span of time, we’ve tripled per-student public education spending, and we’ve witnessed massive efforts at improving race relations, along with a plethora of advocacy groups, new and old. Despite all this effort, we hear that poverty is still rampant, we know the War on Drugs is a total failure, we have seen no improvement whatsoever in student performance, and we are told that race relations still suck.
Are these (and many similar problems) so intractable that nothing we can do makes them better, or is Shirky correct in his assertion that those who purport to be working to end a problem are in fact preserving it?
The living standards of the poor in America have improved tremendously since the advent of that War, but we are told that poverty is as rampant as ever, and we witness the continuing redistribution of staggering amounts of wealth in the continued waging of this War.
The War on Drugs is a colossal failure, one that has done FAR more harm than benefit to both those who use and those who do not.
Public education remains an intractable quagmire, where, as I noted, we spend more and more and more with no measurable improvement in outcome.
And, while it is objectively true that the lot of minorities in America has improved enormously since the advent of the civil rights movement, it is also true that race remains a hot-button issue and that racial strife splashes across the news pages with disturbing regularity.
What portion of these failures of institutional remediation are “despite” best efforts, and what portion are “because” of what Shirky observed?
Imagine the workings over time inside an advocacy group. At first, people get together because of a social injustice they agree exists, and because doing something about it is important to them. They work towards correcting that injustice, and they attract more and more people to their group. As the group grows, it develops form and structure. Power attracts those who crave it, and as a group grows in power, it will attract power-seekers. Such people will find their way to the top of those structures. The original goals of the group become subordinated to the wielding of power for its own sake. The incentive to actually solve the problem diminishes, because the group’s strength and influence is highly dependent on the continued existence of its declared purpose.
Now, imagine that group is governmental. Instead of true believers, it’s led by political appointees and populated by civil servants. The former change as voters elect new people to the Presidency and Congress. The latter? Government employees’ number one motivation is job security, and all other matters take a distant back seat. All that we surmise about advocacy groups is triply true for government agencies.
Look around you. This is the norm, on both the private and public sides. This is how things evolve and how the world works. Shirky is right, and his is a now-and-forever indictment of institutionalized redress of societal problems. It’s also reflected in the eternal adage “power corrupts,” in the observation that there is no animal in the universe more difficult to kill than an on-going government program, in Nancy Pelosi’s farcical assertion that: “The cupboard is bare. There’s no more cuts to make” in response to the matter of government spending, and in the countless laments about corruption made by politicians and statesmen throughout history.
Ceding power to others in order to achieve a desired goal rarely, if ever, works out as intended. Ceding that power to government, with its monopoly on legal violence, is an even worse idea. Distrusting these sorts of delegated and institutional responses is warranted by the realities of human nature and justified by the lessons of history. This is why I am skeptical of anyone who thinks he can make big government good government, and skeptical of those who support big-government politicians, no matter their political label.
Making individual liberty paramount, on the other hand, has worked, does work, and will work. Liberty and capitalism have done far more to elevate living standards and the human condition than any centralized or institutionalized approach to societal problems. Freedom, not its surrender, has been and will continue to be how we improve society.
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Greenpeace is a good example of institutional forces overtaking original goals.