The Imprudent Vulnerability of Social Programs

More and more in recent decades, we have heard from politicians about how they are going to solve the dilemmas faced by our society today. We are told that something needs to be done about illegal immigration, rising poverty rates, healthcare costs, or any other conceivable crisis that will garner an emotional response from voters. Usually, these resolutions require increasing taxes in order to provide funding to special interest groups and most often result in solutions that perpetuate the dilemma rather than eradicate it all together. We often hear jokes about our pharmaceutical corporations not being interested in curing diseases because there are more profits in treatment. However, we completely disregard this concept when it comes to government "curing the illnesses of society."

Reckless spending aside, another danger of social programs that is rarely considered is that popular opinion changes and observable results prove (or disprove) resolution theories. A government is innately slow to respond to these changes and results mostly due to bureaucracy. Another thing to consider, especially in an elected representative government, is that the people making the decisions at the time of the program's implementation will eventually be replaced. We all may support the idea of the current politicians managing our program, but the next politicians may want to add unreasonable regulations, qualifications, or administration because they want the program to fail. While taxpayers continue to fund the program, the intended beneficiaries lose as well.

Another point that should be considered is that our society has thrived on the multitude of different ideas that has given us the ability to try many different solutions to a wide array of problems in order to determine the best option for everyone involved. When we increase taxes in order to fund our chosen solution, we reduce funding to all other proposed solutions. This drastically affects the potential effectiveness of these other ideas resulting in a yet another potential loss for the intended beneficiaries. Allowing individuals to fund the entities that provide their preferred solutions will most likely lead to an entity that provides a mixture of the most effective elements of each available solution. Limiting options to a single provider limits innovation and public support. If we truly want to see an end these crises we should consider that we, as individuals, may not have all of the answers, but a collection of individuals can work toward an eventual resolution.

Most politicians nowadays will repeatedly tell us about how wrong their opponent is and that we must vote for them in order to keep their evil opponent out of power. This is a truly ridiculous notion because, fundamentally, their proposed policies differ only slightly and, most of the time, they wouldn't have the authority to execute these policies even if they were elected to the potential office. Instead of accusing one another of being ignorant or heartless, we should step back and consider each other's point of view. We may find value in the ideas of others. We may even find that we all actually have the same goal in mind. A compromise may be much more realistic that we all think if we work together as individual citizens instead of only looking as far as a political party.