Disasters with blackouts, vaccines, unemployment prove government isn’t the problem
The era of no government is over.
A week without power or water in much of Texas shows us what happens when government abandons its responsibilities. Bonus points to Sen. Ted Cruz, whose spoiled secret getaway to Cancun while his constituents froze reflected that old Texas motto: When the going gets tough, the tough go sunning.
But Kansas and Missouri have had their own problems, too. After months of struggling to meet the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic, both states remain in the lower half of all states for vaccination rates. Years of disinvestment in public health systems have taken their toll.
The unemployment office in Kansas is a cataclysmic failure, prompted by years of neglect of core government functions. Missouri’s system has struggled as well, wrongly paying out thousands of dollars the governor now wants to claw back.
Just this past week, both states experienced rolling power outages. Let’s be honest: For months, the richest nation in the world has resembled a third-world country.
Excuses for this sad record have surfaced. COVID-19 is a 100-year disaster, it is said. Vaccines were developed in record time, even if they aren’t actually getting into arms.
Cold weather is expected in winter. The unemployment computer is old. Then there’s former Texas Gov. Rick Perry: Powerless, waterless homes are a good way to own the libs.
Individually, these excuses may make some sense. But the pattern is clear: America is dysfunctional. And it was utterly predictable, the result of a 50-year project to dismantle government.
“Government is not the solution to our problem,” President Ronald Reagan famously said in his 1981 inaugural address. “Government is the problem.” That claim became the North Star for many conservatives and Republicans, who launched an all-out effort to privatize, remake and reduce government at all levels.
With less revenue, and with faltering public support, governments have defunded a long list of public endeavors: roads, bridges, public health departments, schools, research, state computer systems, codes enforcement, energy regulation, parks and public transit systems among them.
Oversight of utilities and water systems wavered. The grid grew more fragile. Infrastructure repair became a joke. In 2018, studies gave Missouri and Kansas merely average grades for the condition of their dams, bridges and public amenities.
Jails and prisons were privatized. Core public functions were outsourced or eliminated. Government became the enemy.
And entrepreneurs have gotten wealthy from this arrangement. Private prisons are a $5 billion-a-year industry — a solid business model in the nation with the highest incarceration rate in the world. New Evergy CEO David Campbell is a multimillion-dollar man. And for-profit private schools see their bottom line grow every time a family pulls a student out of a public classroom and starts to pay tuition.
These results satisfy the anti-government crowd, but disguise a truth we now see: America has lost the ability to respond to a major emergency.
Government isn’t a switch. It can’t be turned off for years, then turned back on when needed. All levels of government were simply unprepared for a pandemic that has claimed nearly half a million lives in this country.
We can’t do a mass vaccine program. We can’t figure out how schools can safely open. We can’t prevent rolling power blackouts when it turns cold, or hot. Even cleaning the streets can be a challenge.
Rugged self-reliance isn’t the answer. With few exceptions, power and water are things we must do together. Individuals can’t cook up a COVID-19 vaccine in the kitchen. The last year of pandemic has clearly demonstrated the importance of a common effort to solve problems.
That is why governments exist, and why the anti-government work of the last half-century has left thousands shivering in the cold, or fearing for their lives.
The winter will pass, and COVID-19 will eventually go away. That’s when real work must begin to recover the governmental tools we’ve used to make our lives better. If we don’t, the next calamity will be worse, and the American experiment will be in jeopardy.