I have been trying for years to convince the public and politicians that government is the problem. Admittedly, I haven’t had much luck. However, with both the killing of George Floyd and the hell that COVID-19 has dealt society, it seems that more people are coming around.
I like police officers. I just don’t like those who are armed better than some military units, have less training, and that have a union to protect bad officers. It is like putting a scalpel in nurses’ hands, telling them to do a surgery, and slapping them on the back while saying, “Good luck.” They would mean well, but the results would likely be tragic. If you keep giving nurses the scalpel, they will think that surgery is their job, and while the results might continue to be tragic, the normalcy of it all will start to set in.
That is largely what we have done with police.
We have given them more and more power and weaponry, assuming that everything is going to be fine and dandy. I don’t blame the police for this. They have simply been recipients of bad public policy that gave them these powers, broadened their war chests, and armed them beyond belief. This expansion of power has been going on for years.
Through it all, not only have police been protected by their unions, but they are also often protected by law. This should all change. We should drastically reduce funding for the police. We should make police unions illegal, and we should strip the wide-ranging legal protections that police have.
The movement shouldn’t stop there, though. We should reduce funding for as much of government as possible because the policies that it enforces are largely regressive. They affect the poor and underrepresented disproportionately. They hurt the economy, and the rules that the government publishes and enforces are slowly dragging down the country.
Government regulations cost the economy an estimated $1.9 trillion each year. According to the Chamber of Commerce, those losses come from lost wages and productivity, and as a Mercatus paper from 2019 points out, these costs largely fall on lower-income households,
The cost of electricity, which is highly regulated, makes up twice as much of the budgets of low-income households as of high-income households. Consequently, low-income households feel the regulatory price inflation much more than other households.
It isn’t just government programs and regulations directly. Our healthcare system is completely broken because of the government. Government payments make up a large enough proportion of healthcare that they skew the whole market. In addition, doctors have to take on so much risk, from payment delays and rejections to liability, that prices don’t necessarily reflect the true cost of healthcare.
A broken healthcare system is bad for everyone, but who does it affect the most? I might have to pay more than I should for insurance, but I can afford it. There are large groups of people who can’t afford it. The problem isn’t that medical providers are greedy. Where providers have escaped the government, such as the Surgery Center of Oklahoma, the prices are only 10% (and the quality often better) of what the providers that have embraced the government charge patients.
In response to COVID-19, the government has rolled back some regulations. It has given doctors more ability to perform telemedicine. It has given doctors the ability to charge for telemedicine. The government has eased licensing restrictions, making it easier for doctors to practice telemedicine across state lines. The rolling back of regulations in these places has made healthcare more accessible to everyone and at a time of emergency. But, even absent an emergency, government policy should seek to provide more access to healthcare, not less.
The problem is the government. Police brutality is merely a symptom that is currently presenting itself. Government gave police the power that they feel they can use to kneel on the neck of a man slowly having his life taken from him. Government gave hospitals the power and incentives to charge people prices that bankrupt them, starting or continuing a cycle of poverty.
So, count me in on decreasing police funding. Count me in on limiting government wherever government is out of control. Grover Norquist, when asked once about the proper size of government, responded, “I don’t want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.” In other words, the people need to be in control of the government, not the other way around.
Charles Sauer (@CharlesSauer) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is president of the Market Institute and previously worked on Capitol Hill, for a governor, and for an academic think tank.
