Here’s Instapundit Glenn Reynolds making an
important connection between the Secret Service’s recent scandals
and the government’s handling of Ebola here.
From his USA Today column:
There’s a connection between the Secret Service’s Colombian
hooker scandal and Americans’ increased worry about Ebola. Both
have to do with trust.Until recently, if you’d asked Americans to pick government
institutions characterized by efficiency and professionalism, the
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Secret Service
would likely have been at the top of the list. In both cases,
recent evidence now suggests otherwise. And that’s especially
destructive because both agencies depend on trust to do their
jobs.
The head of the Secret Service recently stepped down in the wake
of several semi-near-misses involving the president’s safety. In
the “Colombian hooker scandal,” which involved agents and other
White House-connected folks carousing ahead of Barack Obama’s
arrival in that country, Reynolds points out the investigation was
delayed and torqued out of political considerations. In particular,
a politically connected member of the White House advance team was
not reprimanded while others were canned for the same behavior.
The CDC’s spate of problems with handling other
dangerous pathogens like anthrax, smallpox and deadly influenza
samples doesn’t inspire much confidence either.As George
Will observed,
on Ebola, Americans want to trust the government, but can’t. And as
MSNBC’s Chuck
Todd observed,
the problem stems not just from the CDC, but from the
administration as a whole: “I think one of your challenges though
is a trust deficit that has been created over the last 18
months.”In support of this statement, Todd listed a litany
of government defaults: The IRS scandal with its mysteriously
crashed hard drives and erased emails, Veterans Affairs’ lies about
wait times, the Secret Service’s failures, and more. And he’s
right. After so many lies and failures, we’d be fools to trust
them.
As J.D. Tuccille noted
here yesterday, generals levels of trust in the government are
at or near recorded lows. The Reason-Rupe Poll found that “70
percent of people think public officials abuse their power to help
their friends and hurt their enemies.”
I’ve written elsewhere about the troubling relationship between
levels of trust in government and calls for more
government regulation. According to a 2010 paper comparing
levels of trust in government around the world, Philippe Aghion,
Yann Algan, Pierre Cahuc, and Andrei Shleifer found “one of the
central puzzles in research on political beliefs: Why do people in
countries with bad governments want more government
intervention?”
You got that? It turns out that the less people trust
their governments to do the right thing or be competent, the
more people call for the government to regulate every
aspect of their lives.
Especially from a
libertarian perspective, such findings are deeply troubling. As
government incompetency and failure becomes more self-evident, it
doesn’t mean that people want less from government. They want more
from government, ostensibly to protect themselves. And when you
combine that impulse with the heavily discounted price of
government—between 2009 and 2013, taxes covered just 66 percent of
every dollar spent by the feds—perhaps it’s no surprise the size,
scope, and spending of government keeps growing as trust or
confidence in government declines.
If the work by Aghion, et al., is accurate, one possible way
forward is to actually focus on government functions and programs
that actually work decently or tolerably well (add your suggestions
in the comments).
Use those areas as models for re-establishing trust in
government and from there make the argument that government with
clear, limited missions and functions will inspire the sort of
trust that allows people to start envisioning a world in which they
don’t need ever-bigger government to protect themselves from
slightly-less-bigger government’s actions.
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