Ezra Klein has a column today in which he bemoans that liberals are not able to accomplish their priorities because they have too many other priorities. He starts from a new housing unit for the homeless built in San Francisco. Even though it was funded by a private foundation it still had to run a gauntlet of zoning, environmental, and aesthetic reviews, meet a goal for using small business contractors, ensure that everyone involved was paid a living wage, and so on. It was a modular, factory-built structure, which enraged construction unions, leading to so much grief that the project leaders say they would not use modular construction again.
Klein then moves on to the CHIPS and Science Act, designed to bring semiconductor manufacturing back to the US, which is loaded with requirements that firms receiving grants are supposed to meet:
Page 11, for instance, encourages a pre-application that includes an environmental questionnaire “to assess the likely level of review under the National Environmental Policy Act.” Page 20 mandates that applicants prepare “an equity strategy, in concert with their partners, to create equitable work force pathways for economically disadvantaged individuals in their region,” which should include “building new pipelines for workers, including specific efforts to attract economically disadvantaged individuals and promote diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility.” Page 21 asks for a plan “to include women and other economically disadvantaged individuals in the construction industry,” “strongly encourages” the use of project labor agreements and sets out requirements for “access to child care for facility and construction workers.”
Pages 23 and 24 ask applicants to detail how they will include minority-, veteran- and female-owned businesses, as well as small businesses, in their supply chain and offer seven bullet points detailing how this might be done, including dividing supply chain requirements “into smaller tasks or quantities to expand access” and “establishing delivery schedules for subcontractors that encourage participation by small, minority-owned, veteran-owned and women-owned businesses.” Then there are requirements for “a climate and environment responsibility plan,” as well as community investments in areas like transit, affordable housing and schools.
As a veteran of the federal contracting process I can tell you that most of these requirements are all actually routine. (I've never seen the childcare one.) They are less scary than they look, for a couple of reasons. Big companies that work for the Feds already have offices dedicated to finding partner firms in all these categories; also, they are not exactly requirements. Notice that the bidding firms have to have a plan for doing this, not actually do it. The doing of it is just one of the "performance metrics" on which they will eventually be judged, along with being on-time and on-budget and so on.
But that does all cost money. And take time, which of course also adds to the cost.
Why? Well, it has become the mantra of liberalism worldwide that there should be no victims; that there is no goal short of winning a war that justifies hurting people. Nobody should be exploited or harmed to build that homeless shelter or manufacture that shirt or make that movie. Nothing is worth doing if doing it requires paying people miserable wages or causing pollution or destroying the habitat of threatened species. This doesn't just apply to the government; I recently wrote about this as it applies to museum docents.
I find myself wondering what Klein thinks might be the alternative. How about if I framed the question this way: is is more important to you to build housing for homelss people in San Francisco or to build a world in which everyone who wants to work can get a job at wages that will support a decent life? In which we are not destroying the planetary systems on which life depends? In which we are not wantonly making the world uglier and meaner?
Klein worries that liberals have too many goals to accomplish any of them. But I might argue that liberals have in fact only one goal: to make life better.
And that turns out to be a very difficult goal. If you are a libertarian capitalist you say, hogwash, if we just get government out of the way and let people and businesses do whatever they want, life will get better as a natural product of people pursuing happiness. But I don't believe that and I doubt Klein does, either. I think the whole point of having democracy is to shape the world toward the interests of the mass of people, rather than of the rich and powerful. I think it is actually quite difficult to create an economy that benefits the poor as much as the rich, and that nobody has ever done this without massive government intervention.
But that doesn't mean I discount the burdens involved. I write here regularly about the human and economic costs of bureaucracy, which has become one of main miseries in our lives. I am always looking for ways we could accomplish our goals without a mass of detailed rules; a good example would be replacing our crazy-quilt climate policies with a simple carbon tax.
But the goal of building housing for San Francisco's homeless is not more important than the overall goals of liberalism, and if it can only be done by hiring dodgy contractors who pay miserable wages to illegal immigrants, or by destroying watersheds or poisoning the planet, I say, no thanks.
6 comments:
"I think the whole point of having democracy is to shape the world toward the interests of the mass of people, rather than of the rich and powerful."
Spoken like a true Athenian or at least the demos. 2,500 years later and . . .? All those monuments (public works projects) keeping the demos happy. But democracy didn't prevent Athens from committing suicide by hubris. Perhaps in the 21st century we will commit suicide by environmental statement, and that will be how the environment is saved. I like the irony in that. But I'm still placing my money on hubris. It's a tried and true favorite of history.
@Shadow
"Democracy" meant something very, very, VERY different in ancient Athens, so your comparison is basically nonsense.
I would say for most of the mainstream political movement the goal is to make life better for people. There difference is in how "better" is understood and what one think is possible. E.g. I am very sceptical massive government interventions will bring only good and that it is possible to achieve every possible goal; some of the goals also seem to me to be simply unjust, even if well-intended.
It's been argued that liberal in USA are "coalition of the fringes" and this may explain why they have so many goals which they want to achieve right now, right away, every one of them equally important. And even I am quite sure the current older and oldest generation of Americans is more liberal than ever, one simply cannot achieve everything even if one has a power over almost everything.
A diggression, which is why it comes in separate comment - the funny thing is "power over almost everything." I thought about my hme country - which is supposedly run by the right-wing government. And yet rightwingers like me still feel like if we are on the rout, with only occassional victories here and there (some of them controversial), while liberals in my country seem to be forcing their favorite goals (like my uni introducing all the fancy modern institutions like courses to make us more sensitive to equality etc.)
@szopeno- I agree that the liberal state is dangerous because you can't do all the things liberals want to do without accummulating a lot of power. Modern states claim the power to control what you burn in your fireplace, what your kids are taught in school, what you can drive and where, what firms have to pay their employees, who can be fired, and so on. A modern society is hedged around with millions of regulations. This really does make us less free, and it presents endless opportunities for corruption.
Sometimes there are better ways to achieve our goals. One of my favorite examples is that rather than issue lots of rules about credit card security, the US government just said, "credit firms are responsible for all losses due to fraud." That leaves it up to the private companies to decide how much and what kind of security they want and how much they want to inconvenience their customers for security's sake. I think replacing all our fuel consumption laws with a carbon tax would be another great simplification.
But as I see it, human societies have a dreary pattern of falling into hereditary class systems with grotesque unfairness, and we know from experience that without regulations the basic tragedy of the commons will lead to environmental devastation. So we are stuck with a hugely powerful state, and must strive to control it through democratic politics.
@John Well, I find myself in a broad agreement with this.
It may be even that perfect solution to some problem would require government regulation/making it larger. But I still think it's a good thing to be sceptical and have someone who will be ideologically opposed for the simple reason that this way we can more easily defend ourselves against potential corruption.
As for an other example - US healthcare is I presume more in private hands than in Europe and as I hate t admit it, there are studies showing it's much more expansive, giving less bang for a buck... so sometimes maybe state is useful.
As for pattern of hereditary class systems... well, the thing many on my side are fearing that hugely powerful state could benefit more the large corporations or elites, preventing their unsettling by new, small, hungry enterpreneurs. The more regulation, the harder it's for newcomer to enter the market.
I hope what I wrote makes sense... Last two weeks I hardly got any sleep and I am starting to feel effects.
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