The federal government says it is going to take them two years merely to identify those migrant children that it held and then released. There are people out there who insist that the federal government should be running very much larger parts of our lives, a logical conclusion being that there are people out there who consider reality irrelevant when considering political policy. But then, there are people who vote for Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, so that’s just a statement of the obvious, really.
However, it is possible to put that childish, but most fun, political insult to one side and actually consider the point. The government is telling us that it will take those 24 months simply to identify separated families. They’ve got like names, numbers of identification documents, addresses in many cases. Presumably, there’s some mass of anxious parents asking where the heck Uncle Sam has put their kids. And yet, it’ll take two years. Note, not two years to reconcile everyone back into a pack of Happy Families. Two years just to identify.
No, this isn’t the result of the Trump administration gutting the bureaucracy — if only they had! Nor is it that the Republicans don’t care about immigrants or anything. It’s simply that government just isn’t very good at doing things (as any casual visit to the Department of Motor Vehicles shows).
The underlying economics here could be described as the socialist calculation problem, maybe the pretense of knowledge from F.A. Hayek’s Nobel lecture. The point at the heart of both being that whoever is in power centrally just never can have enough information to be able to plan or do things. Too much of the knowledge required to get things to actually happen is dispersed throughout the society. That idea that the very clever technocrats from the right colleges can plan our activities from their offices just doesn’t work, because the necessary information just cannot reach those offices.
It’s this which does indeed lead to that problem of identifying those people and the two years it’ll take to try to do so. They simply don’t know; that’s the very statement they’re making.
The importance of this is that this is always true. They don’t know enough to be able to plan an entire economy; the Soviets proved that. Actually, the Soviets admitted that they didn’t even know what it was they were supposed to be planning — just what is the societal utility function that we’re trying to maximize? It’s also not possible for government to plan and deliver healthcare. My native Britain has the National Health Service, much admired by either those who have never experienced it or those who have but never experienced any other system. When measured against other rich world systems, it scores badly in “mortality amenable to health care.” Meaning that it’s very fair, very equal, but lousy at actually curing people. Oh, and it makes you wait and wait for that bad treatment.
What is it that the new millennial movement insists we should all have? Government planning the economy, government running healthcare: the two very things that we know it cannot in fact do. Simply because, as with even being able to identify children, government just doesn’t, and cannot, have the information necessary to do these tasks — and that’s before we even start to talk about the “Green New Deal,” which appears to be based upon the idea that giving Ocasio-Cortez a $93 trillion checkbook will work out well.
Reality tends to differ with these dreams, and reality is the bit that’s left over after you wake up. Government is necessary; yes, it is. It’s also really bad at doing things, so let us use it where we must and carry that load of everything else ourselves.
Tim Worstall (@worstall) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is a senior fellow at the Adam Smith Institute. You can read all his pieces at The Continental Telegraph.
