Only the government can do certain things. A useful difference between a progressive and the rest of us is that we restrict what government does to only those things which both must be done and that only government can do.
Our rationale: government isn’t very good at doing things.
Our example today is San Francisco. A city where they are paying $60,000 a year for a tent. Not even the tent itself, just the space where you could put a $30 special from Walmart. This is not even the purchase price of a campground, the city already owns the ground. This is what the city spends on security, showers, bathrooms, per tent, for people to sleep in a city square. True, this also includes three meals a day for the homeless folks. But that’s quite some menu cost!
Even in San Francisco, we could be financing actual apartments for this amount.
We should agree that support of the homeless is valuable. We might well think this is best done by destroying zoning laws so people could get on with building homes. Given the mess of current building laws in San Francisco, it is only government that has the power to cure the problem. So, homelessness meets our dual test for government action. There’s a problem here that needs to be solved, and only government action can do so.
But we now see what is actually done — vastly wasteful and only short-term actions. The tent city is not a permanent solution. It will last for perhaps another year. But this solution involves using resources that could have been spent on longer-term action. Again, government just isn’t very good at doing even those things which fall under its unique remit.
That is why we must restrict government action to those special situations. Trying to get it to solve problems that have other viable solutions, or things that don’t in fact need to be done, means wasting resources on a vast scale.
