Why Hard Choices?
By Lee Emmerich Jamison
The Texas legislature is back at it again, trying to find a way to finance a bloated, top heavy, inefficient educational system. Also, I recently stumbled on a discussion group on environmental issues and human safety. Think of the confluence of authoritarian control and effectiveness. In almost no area of American life do the common people have less control than they have over their children’s education, and in no area of American life do we fail more miserably or consistently in relation to the rest of the world. At the same time, however, many want America to concede its environmental future to an authoritarian outside system, without any serious look at what has become of peoples who permitted such controls elsewhere.
Those who want governments or authoritarian systems to take over control of processes like education or environmental safety really want important decisions to be easy so we need not worry about them. So let’s talk about government control for a moment, and think in terms of the relative safety and effectiveness of systems in two different kinds of worlds.
Almost any reasonably aware adult can tell you where America’s worst accident in the nuclear production of commercial electric power was. Three Mile Island. Yet Three Mile Island released almost NO radiation. No one died. It cannot be argued that thyroid or other cancers rose as a result of the accident, at least not by people interested in facts. If you were a frequent commercial flyer who lived inside the fence at Three Mile Island in 1979-80 you would have received more radiation from SPACE than from normal operations and the venting of a small amount of secondary coolant steam that occurred in the accident. There was a leak of radioactive primary coolant, but it was kept inside the containment building.
Look also at mining accidents in the U.S. In two separate coal mining accidents last year fewer than sixteen men died. A considerable number of errors had to be made for those accidents to overcome standard safety procedures. (Some of those errors were made by government inspectors, too.) That is the result of hard decision-making processes working in a situation in which antagonism between government and the private marketplace mitigates the inherent corruptions of both types of organization.
You need look no further than Chernobyl to see the fruit of unbridled, total government control. See what the wisest of the wise do when people set their fate unquestioningly in the hands of authority? There you get quick, easy decisions. There you also have real mass death, rampant cancer, loss of whole communities and the devastation of an entire region as an economic asset. The people there became medical guinea pigs- little better than farm animals for the manipulation of the system.
Total authoritarian control of policy is a great idea- well, except for every place in which it has been tried. The old Soviet Union’s environmental record alone gives us more examples than can be explored in this format. A simple Internet search on such terms as- Aral Sea, Lake Baikal, Semipalitinsk region of Kasakhstan, and the Chelyalinsk region in the Urals will reveal what a “benevolent” authoritarian hand can do when it answers to no one.
Governments do have a vital role to fill in maintaining the transparency and honesty of free markets, but there must be a vital antagonism, even open conflict, between the marketplaces of products and ideas and governmental entities for us to reap the greatest benefit from these types of organization. That is uncomfortable because we are forced to listen to, and participate in, the discussion with people with whom we disagree- often vehemently. Often we are forced to see clearly what we believe ought to happen- but won’t. The nightmare scenario, though, is that government becomes the marketplace of products, ideas, and policies. Then, with no one to enforce transparency and nothing but budgeting artifice to establish efficiency and fiscal discipline, human corruption reigns supreme. There you have a picture of education in Texas.
Only a fool believes people in governmental authority are better people than those in private industry. Today many such fools would hand the most critical decisions in their world to a set of unsupervised people just because they are frustrated at the rate of change in a world where decisions are hard.
For my part I want to continue to live in a world where decisions are hard and sixteen miners dying in two months, or the release of a minimally radioactive cloud of steam, is big news, rather than the authoritarian world of a place like the Soviet Union, where decisions are easy and, in the silence of news blackouts, hundreds die and thousands are genetically maimed by a few moments’ inattention, or China, where, on average, sixteen coal miners die EVERY SINGLE DAY.
Furthermore I would like to live in a world where, like most of Europe, if our schools do poorly we can make a hard choice of our own and take our child and the state’s money for his or her education to schools we think will do better. We already pay more than any other industrialized country for our children’s education. Perhaps then we will get our money’s worth, however we wind up paying for it.
Lee Jamison can be reached for comment at lee@leejamison.com
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