Wildfire season is underway, and the Forest Service wants everyone to believe that the huge increase in fire suppression costs is because of so many new homes in the “wildland-urban interface.” But just where is this interface?
The above map provides an answer for Oregon. The pink areas are supposed to be wildland-urban interface. In addition, however, the map marks every “interface community” with a pound sign (#).
Click on the map to get a larger view (1.9MB pdf), and you’ll find that every community from Portland to French Glen in the southeastern Oregon high desert is marked with a pound sign. Is growth in Portland, Salem, and Eugene what the Forest Service means by more homes in the wildland-urban interface?
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Thanks to Oregon’s land-use laws, almost all new housing is with the urban-growth boundaries of incorporated cities (which do not include French Glen). Census data show that, between 2000 and 2007, the number of new homes in Oregon rural areas grew by just 6.5 percent. (If you click on either of these links, choose “download” from the “Print/Download” menu to get a file showing all the states. Or click here to get my spreadsheet showing rural home numbers by state in 1990, 2000, and 2007.)
In the same period, the number of homes in rural Montana grew by 6.4 percent. But in Nevada they grew by 170 percent. Did wildfire suppression costs grow that much more in Nevada than in Oregon or Montana? I doubt it, but when I find out, I will let you know.
Update: The Antiplanner’s faithful ally, Andy Stahl, sent me this Forest Service report reviewing the relationship between homes and firefighting costs in Oregon and Washington. The researchers were dumbfounded that they could not find “a relationship between either total housing or housing density and suppression cost.” They speculate that this might be because more homes mean more roads, which makes it easier for firefighters to suppress fires.
Or maybe the Forest Service just spends all the money it can on every fire, whether there are thousand homes or nothing but an old shack in the vicinity. In any case, it does not appear federal or state firefighting funds are subsidizing exurbanites in any way.
First, as I’ve said before, you cannot fix a mistake perpetrated for ~100 years in one year. Many forests have had their fire regimes screwed up. Many of these forests are where the second homes are.
Second, in my view if you build a second home in the trees, you are on your own.
However, tell that to the people with second homes. It’ll never happen. The issue is that finally the Larry Craigs of this world no longer exploit our forests on massive scales, and as a result the receipts are down in the NFs. Too bad no one has fixed their funding stream.
Now the people rich enough to afford second homes are being affected. Fix the funding, re-hire some of the ‘combat’ biologists who told the truth and were fired by the Larry Craigs of the world for it, and wean the rich off of protection for their second homes. The houses burning down and being abandoned will also lessen the habitat fragmentation occurring in the WUI.
DS
Every year it’s the same story. Fires will be worse, hurricanes will be worse, (pick your natural disaster) will be worse, and we need more funding. It’s all about money and growing whatever agency is asking for it. I trust public sector bureaucrats only as far as the financial statements will get me. Chasing the money has become priority one from the school superintendents to the department heads. Serve the public? Only after we get more money.
From one of the Antiplanner’s linked stories:
A conservative estimate is that 25% of all costs of protecting homes from wildfires within Montana are paid for by the state
Was the Antiplanner’s failure to criticize this subsidy an honest mistake?
Would he have failed to criticize the subsidy if the sentence had read
A conservative estimate is that 25% of all costs of protecting homes in high-density, mixed-use New Urbanist neighborhoods from wildfires within Montana are paid for by the state
DSNow the people rich enough to afford second homes are being affected. Fix the funding, re-hire some of the ‘combat’ biologists who told the truth and were fired by the Larry Craigs of the world for it, and wean the rich off of protection for their second homes. The houses burning down and being abandoned will also lessen the habitat fragmentation occurring in the WUI.
JHC! It’s okay in your twisted mind to let property be destroyed as long as it belongs to a rich person? I revoke any credit I ever gave you for being anything other than a typical statist thug. You have all the best ideas how to spend other peoples’ money and how to dispose of other peoples’ property.
The solution, as usual, is in the free market. It is nothing new for rural dwellers to pay user fees for fire protection, as well as trash removal and other services that are often funded by taxes in larger urban areas. When the cost of that fire protection has gone up, the providers have passed that cost on to the customers. No taxpayers are affected one iota. If rural fire protection in Oregon has become a drain on public coffers, perhaps Oregon needs to rethink the idea of fire protection being a public utility in the first place.
Every year it’s the same story. Fires will be worse, hurricanes will be worse, (pick your natural disaster)…[predictable yada]
Du-uh. Golly I wonder why. An increase maybe?
Sheesh.
DS
I revoke any credit I ever gave you for being anything other than a typical statist thug.
ZZzzzzzzz.
You don’t have to apologize to me as I could care less what you think, but Randal might be a bit peeved that he’s characterized as a statist thug.
DS
DS: I notice no part of your reply addresses my substantive argument, natch. This seems to be a frequent occurrence with you. First, because you are incapable of directy confronting a substantial assertion without resorting to subject-changing, red herrings, misdirection, or ad hominem. Second, because nothing in your statist philosophy is capable of refuting the facts of reality.
The Antiplanner has inevitability on his side, because a government cannot create wealth or achievement; it can only eat its own tail. Argue though you will for your boondoggling artifice, you know you can’t accomplish a lick of it without expropriating the property of producers.
Mike,
You can’t argue your way out of a paper bag. Your premise is wrong – that is, your argument has no substance. When you graduate high school, you may want to take a rhetoric class if tech school offers one.
DS
DS, who are you trying to convince?
I replied to you, Mike (thus the reason for typing ‘Mike’).
That your capacity to understand/ be convinced is questionable shouldn’t prevent attempts at pointing out you appear to be incapable of understanding a comment with a link in it1.
After all, there is that off chance you may indeed be capable of understanding/convincing, evidence here notwithstanding.
—–
But enough of comment spam to distract away from inconvenient arguments about homeowner expectations.
DS
1 This is being charitable, of course. It is equally likely you are incapable of understanding argumentation constructed for those with capacities beyond high school.
Before continuing your hopefully civil discussions, please read the update.
I reiterate my original argument:
“The solution, as usual, is in the free market. It is nothing new for rural dwellers to pay user fees for fire protection, as well as trash removal and other services that are often funded by taxes in larger urban areas. When the cost of that fire protection has gone up, the providers have passed that cost on to the customers. No taxpayers are affected one iota. If rural fire protection in Oregon has become a drain on public coffers, perhaps Oregon needs to rethink the idea of fire protection being a public utility in the first place.”
I have yet to see any of those points refuted. I get billed quarterly for fire protection services for my summer home in northern Arizona. The taxpayers pay zero. I guess I’m doing pretty well owning two houses on a high-school student’s salary, eh DS?
Antiplanner, et al.,
Not only are fire suppression costs unrelated geographically to the wildland-urban interface, hazardous (sic) fuel treatments are unrelated to acres burned, homes lost, firefighters killed, and fire suppression costs.
The National Fire Plan created the hazardous fuel reduction program. The Forest Service says the program is intended to help save the lives of firefighters and citizens and to reduce the risk of catastrophic fire to our communities, forests and rangelands. Since the NFP’s adoption in 2001, the Fire Plan’s hazardous fuel program has treated fuel on 29 million acres at a total cost of at least $2 billion, ranging from $1,200 an acre for hand clearing of brush to $20 an acre for prescribed burning.
So what’s been the return on our $2 billion investment? Has the program saved lives, reduced fires or protected communities? From 2001 to 2007, 136 firefighters lost their lives in the line of duty. In the preceding seven-year period (1994 to 2000), 130 firefighters died. Under the Fire Plan, fires have burned an average of 7 million acres each year. In the seven-year period before the plan was implemented, fires burned 4 million acres a year. In the past seven years, firefighting costs averaged $1.4 billion a year. In the preceding seven-year period, costs averaged half that amount. Under the Fire Plan, 1,482 houses have been lost annually to wildfires (most in southern California), compared to an average 563 houses lost annually in the two years before the plan.
The federal firefighting agencies acknowledge that they have little to show after spending well over $1 billion treating hazardous (sic) fuels, as explained in this excerpt from a 2007 memo by the fire heads of the BLM and FS:
“The National Fire Plan has been our guidance for seven years. With it came an increased emphasis on fuel treatments to reduce risk of wildfire to communities and the environment. From 2001 through 2006, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and the Forest Service (FS) in the Pacific Northwest have accomplished over 1.3 million acres of treatment. We know that wildfires have impacted fuel treatment areas, with generally positive results, but we have only some anecdotal documentation.â€Â
Read the memo
Their solution? Collect more anecdotal documentation.
In contrast, two scientists analyzed the effectiveness of fuel treatments at the landscape scale. They explain:
“Fuel treatment effectiveness and non-treatment risks can be estimated from the probability of fire occurrence. Using extensive fire records for western US Forest Service lands, we estimate fuel treatments have a mean probability of 2.0-7.9% of encountering moderate- or high-severity fire during an assumed 20-year period of reduced fuels.â€Â
Read the report
Their study concludes: “At the scales of our analysis, results indicate that even if fuel treatments were very effective when encountering fire of any severity, treatments will rarely encounter fire, and thus are unlikely to substantially reduce effects of high-severity fire.â€Â
In sum, hazardous (sic) fuel treatments are like building flood control dams in places where floods are unlikely to occur. How much sense does that make?
So let’s stop putting out wildfires and let forests restore their natural ecosystem function of disturbance and succession.
Mike wrote, “The Antiplanner has inevitability on his side, because a government cannot create wealth or achievement; it can only eat its own tail.”
Governments (and other organizatons) can and do create wealth and achievement. They create wealth by improving the health, education, safety, and productivity of people and other organizations. Examples are public schools from preschool to university, public hospitals, DARPA’s ARPAnet (which became the internet), government space research which gave us weather, communications and Global Positioning System.
Governments can also destroy wealth through war, inflating the money supply and stupid regulations and laws.
Oops, left out the word “satellites” after Global Positioning System”
Tad, what you’ve given are examples of the government destroying wealth, not creating it. This is because each of the things you name could be accomplished more effectively and efficiently by private industry, and because each of those things are not part of the core governmental purpose of protection of individual rights. To the extent that those things expropriate wealth by taxation to be funded, they destroy the differential of wealth that will now not enter into the stream of commerce, versus what those things would have cost privately as a cost to users.
You mention public schools, which are a perfect example: bloated, archaic, administration-heavy dinosaurs that can’t deliver anywhere near the results of even voucher-driven charter schools, let alone for-profit or religious private schools, yet cost far more than those private and quasi-private alternatives. (And I’m an atheist, so I don’t have a dog in that hunt.) Public hospitals are another great example: if there were no public subsidy of health care, there would be no need for a public hospital to exist. (All hospitals could just require payment). Public subsidies of health care are expropriation of wealth from individuals, directly antithetical to the concept of the protection of individual rights, which is the only legitimate purpose of a government.
Any government function that is not military, police, court, or the limited administration necessary for those three, is not a function protective of individual rights. To the extent that any other function is performed by the government instead of letting private industry do it, the differential of the taxation used to fund it, versus the use fees or price the private sector would demand, that differential is the destruction of wealth, not the creation of it. Because the government is not bound to the bottom line, there is not an overriding necessity of reduction in costs and excellence in production to drive profits. Accordingly, any government job not within those core functions is costing more and producing less than it would if it existed in the private sector. You can follow the tightening spiral of economic loss from there, hence: the government eating its own tail.
Tad, continued: For a brief analysis limited to how public schools figure into that equation, there is a blog analysis published here.
Mike:“Any government function that is not military, police, court, or the limited administration necessary for those three, is not a function protective of individual rights.”
ws: Society (and our economies) are a bit more complex than just needing military, police, court, etc. What is the justification for just those functions only? The Constitution?
Mike:“Any government function that is not military, police, court, or the limited administration necessary for those three, is not a function protective of individual rights.â€Â
ws: Society (and our economies) are a bit more complex than just needing military, police, court, etc. What is the justification for just those functions only? The Constitution?
Mike: The answer to that would encompass far more than a blog comment, but if you are genuinely interested to know, I’ll give a try at capturing it in a nutshell: Not just the U.S. Constitution specifically, but the enlightenment-era ideas embraced by the Founders that give structure to a human government based on the supremacy of reason, humankind’s only innate tool for survival. Ultimately, in order to physically survive, a human being must be protected from external force (military), from internal force or fraud (police, criminal court), and have an objective mechanism for settling honest disputes with other human beings based on objective laws (civil courts). There is some amount of government necessary to administer those mechanisms — a small Dept of the Interior, a small Dept of State, and so forth. Those functions for a human being’s survival, the human cannot do on his or her own nearly as well as a government deriving its power from the consent of the governed. The human’s survival is the most elemental individual right (life), and from that right necessarily extends the rights of liberty and property, because an infringement upon either right threatens the first. Everything else, all government “services,” are duplicative of what a free market can and ought to provide.
I apologize for what is probably some inadequacy in that explanation. It has been some years since my Law, Morality, and Politics class, and that is where I delved into the underlying philosophy most deeply. In fair disclosure, I have mentioned before that I am an Objectivist, and everything I have said should be consistent with Objectivism, so if you are interested in having it explained by a better teacher, there are always the writings of Ayn Rand to explore.
Hope that was helpful.
Like I said, our economy and societal structure is a bit more complex than when the founding fathers were “in town”. If we had a small Dept. of Interior, you probably wouldn’t be living in (water subsidized) Arizona!
ws: Like I said, our economy and societal structure is a bit more complex than when the founding fathers were “in townâ€Â. If we had a small Dept. of Interior, you probably wouldn’t be living in (water subsidized) Arizona!
Mike: What difference does that make? I’m sure I’d live somewhere else, or possibly I would be part of the smaller population that could have lived here anyway. Part of Objectivism is learning to detach your analysis from the concretes of what is to the abstracts of why it is, what else it could have been, and what it ought to be. The Founding Fathers understood the essentials and they understood only too well, with Britain as a cautionary example, what happens when the government overreaches. The entire point of creating America in the first place was to reduce the government to its bare essentials, and if you look at the original articles of the Constitution, they were most of the way there.
BTW, Randal and I are actually closer on this issue than some 8th graders would have you believe.
My comments – which 8th graders tried to mischaracterize – in some areas (e.g. ‘sSecond’) support some of Randal’s assertions. Choosing the category ‘wildfire’ will return a list of essays in which I actually agree with Randal about 33% of the time.
Randal is right to rail against the FS. If my mentor were not in the employ of the FS and a world-class scientist in his field, and had I not spent not inconsiderable time in the field with wonderful FS field botanists, I’d likely be sounding more like Randal on this issue.
DS
Mike“The entire point of creating America in the first place was to reduce the government to its bare essentials, and if you look at the original articles of the Constitution, they were most of the way there.”
ws:I actually do whole-heatedly agree that a smaller gov is a better gov., and that is a major reason for the creation of the US. That being said, I just find the absolute “bare” essentials you prescribed does not account for a lot of things, and you assume that private industry will fill the void.
Mike said:
ws: Like I said, our economy and societal structure is a bit more complex than when the founding fathers were “in townâ€Â. If we had a small Dept. of Interior, you probably wouldn’t be living in (water subsidized) Arizona!
Mike: What difference does that make? I’m sure I’d live somewhere else, or possibly I would be part of the smaller population that could have lived here anyway. Part of Objectivism is learning to detach your analysis from the concretes of what is to the abstracts of why it is, what else it could have been, and what it ought to be. The Founding Fathers understood the essentials and they understood only too well, with Britain as a cautionary example, what happens when the government overreaches. The entire point of creating America in the first place was to reduce the government to its bare essentials, and if you look at the original articles of the Constitution, they were most of the way there.
THWM: That’s all well & good in theory. Though it’s also after the fact too.
ws: I just find the absolute “bare†essentials you prescribed does not account for a lot of things, and you assume that private industry will fill the void.
Mike: Such as? (And just because the government *could* do a thing, doesn’t mean the government *should*. But let’s explore the possibilities here.)
When there is a perceived need that individuals, businesses, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are not meeting, often governments will take on the task of fulfilling the need. Or when governments don’t satisfy the need or do a poor job, individuals, businesses and/or NGOs may take on the task. Often businesses pressure governments to take on tasks they don’t want to do. Public education is an example. Businesses need educated people to work for them. But they don’t want to have their own school to educate children to be their future employees because the payback period is too long and the children may go to work for someone else when they are sufficiently educated. So instead of paying for their own private school for future employees businesses try to locate where there are already good public and/or private schools and pay taxes to support the existing public schools.
Where I live (Clark County Washington) governmental organizations are in the electricity, water, sewer, education, health, people transport, mail delivery, TV programming, railroad and road businesses. There are public and private companies and NGOs also providing and competing to do some of the same functions. In some instances the governments took over functions (such as the railroad) after private businesses failed.
The United States has been on the way to (partial) socialism since at least 1775 when the Continental Congress issued paper currency and appointed Benjamin Franklin to be Postmaster General.
A Chinese government (Emperor Wu-ti) started schools to train future employees over 2100 years ago.
For every task there are probably optimum tools, organization, and people skills to do it. Usually governments are less efficient than other organizations because they don’t have sufficient incentives to be efficient. This doesn’t mean that they can’t create wealth. I believe that the Panama Canal created wealth, and it was a government project that succeeded where a corporate effort had failed. I have already written about the wealth created by earth satellites, which have all benefited from government programs to develop launch vehicles. Even after recent financial help from the US government there have been hardly any satellite launches by launch vehicles not developed with government funding.
In summary, history has shown that while governments are often less efficient, they have done some important wealth-building tasks quicker than other organizations.
Sorry to be off-topic, Randal. I don’t think the Forest Service is creating wealth these days; the trees are doing that on their own.
Tad — I have some places to be today, but you’ve made a genuine answer and I want to write a genuine follow-up. I’ll do what I can to get it posted before the weekend is out. Enjoy your Saturday!
Tad: When there is a perceived need that individuals, businesses, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are not meeting, often governments will take on the task of fulfilling the need.
Mike: OK, I think we might be communicating suboptimally here. I am well aware that government IS performing these functions in most cases. I am saying that they SHOULD not, because it is not part of the core function of government, which is protection of individual rights. (Extending from this, I reach the argument that the government does not create wealth, because anything it does that private industry can do, private industry will do more efficiently and without expropriation by taxation.) From reading your reply, I am concerned that you are fixed on the concretes of the argument, i.e.: Who is this Mike guy who thinks government isn’t doing these things? Where does he think he gets his public utilities? SO just to be clear, I am aware, and I am not arguing the concretes, but the abstract of how things SHOULD be.
Tad: Public education is an example. Businesses need educated people to work for them. […] So instead of paying for their own private school for future employees businesses try to locate where there are already good public and/or private schools and pay taxes to support the existing public schools.
Mike: I linked a blog post in my earlier answer to you in which the waste and inefficiency of public schools are quantified in a basic analysis. My question to you on this count is: Why should the businesses pay either? What about the PARENTS? Parents are the ones responsible for the upbringing of their children. The classic comeback to this is: Not all parents can afford it. I’ll set aside for a moment that huge, huge amounts of taxation at the state and municipal levels funds the public school system and would be put back into the pockets of the taxpayers if the public schools were discontinued, leaving virtually everyone able to afford it. For those who still could not, who cannot produce enough to earn sufficient value to pay for the education of their children, I say: Their need is not a claim on the lives of those who CAN produce. It becomes a violation of individual rights the moment one person’s money is expropriated to pay for services rendered to another person. This is the antithesis of the proper purpose of government.
Tad: Where I live (Clark County Washington) governmental organizations are in the electricity, water, sewer, education, health, people transport, mail delivery, TV programming, railroad and road businesses. There are public and private companies and NGOs also providing and competing to do some of the same functions.
Mike: Indeed. And in some cases, my argument goes only to efficiency and no further; for example, public utilities. Yes, they could be privatized and would probably be more efficient. But at least when I pay taxes toward the sewers or streets, etc, it’s functionally the same as if I were paying use fees, and we’re only dickering over amounts. Things like health care are another issue altogether. I couldn’t begin to argue that in such a space as this — and that’s a shame because it’s an issue near and dear to me — but suffice it to say that government involvement in health care is expropriation on the intake side and violation of freedom to contract at the point of service side. Under no circumstances should the government ever be involved in health care as anything more than a minimal regulatory entity, and that much only to shield the public against fraud or physical harm (protecting individual rights). As a better writer than I once said, and I’m paraphrasing here because I don’t have it in front of me, “When you’re on the operating table, how safe will you feel knowing that the government has tied the hands of your surgeon, frustrated him at every turn, and dictated the terms and manner in which his skills and abilities may be applied, and to whom, and for how much compensation? It’s a frightening thing if your doctor is the kind of man who resents it, and an even more dangerous thing if he’s the kind of man who does not.”
Tad: The United States has been on the way to (partial) socialism since at least 1775 when the Continental Congress issued paper currency and appointed Benjamin Franklin to be Postmaster General.
Mike: Paper currency that’s backed by an instrument of objective value (i.e. gold) is fine and does not creep us toward socialism. Once we became unhinged from the gold standard, starting with FDR and finishing with Nixon, THEN we were well and truly screwed monetarily. That’s why you see today the utter failure of Greenspan’s monetarist policies.
Tad: Usually governments are less efficient than other organizations because they don’t have sufficient incentives to be efficient. This doesn’t mean that they can’t create wealth.
Mike: We both agree and disagree here. In the private sector, ultimately, one must answer to the bottom line of profitability. If (action) does not drive profitability, then (action) is unacceptable; conversely, an action that ruffles someone’s feathers typically passes if it aided the bottom line. In government, one’s primary job is to avoid creating political embarrassment for one’s boss. That’s it. Typically this means doing one’s job well and thoroughly, but in practice this means never doing more than one must, never innovating or sticking one’s neck out, and never building anything of lasting value that a future political rival of your boss could appropriate. That perspective is so far away from a bottom line of profitability that it’s a wonder sometimes that governments function at all.
Tad: [Panama Canal]; [satellite launch vehicles].
Mike: The government can “do” just about anything it can apply force or spend money to do, but the problem is what economic impact that action is going to have. I suggest that a merchant venture capitalist somewhere would have solved the Panama Canal problem before too much longer if the government had not and had made us all free-riders, but of course we can only speculate. I concede that reasonable individuals may disagree about whether that project created wealth. Still, that’s one project out of the millions of things government does… even a broken clock is right twice a day.
Space launch vehicles, however, are connected to the government’s legitimate military purpose of securing orbital space and developing adequate orbital and spaceborne transportation. So all that space-race spending for NASA to get us off the ground? Legit, because military protection is part of protection of individual rights. The government still did not “create wealth” by doing this, however. The government spent so many untold trillions of tax dollars to win the space race that, if expanded to future value from its present discount, our distant descendants *might* one day hope to finally be “in the black” on it. Naturally, once the Cold War coast was clear, private companies jumped all over one another to contract for launch services for their satellites and such. It is those companies that created wealth out of what was and still is a legitimate government money sink, not the government itself.
There is still more to learn from this, however! Now that the space race is over, companies that stood by while Uncle Sam footed the bill for launch vehicles before are scrambling, playing catch-up to develop the space transportation technology they could have perfected decades ago. That’s why you have Virgin and USN and SpaceX (plug for my brother-in-law, who works at SpaceX in Waco) undertaking immense projects to ensure that they turn the first profit from private-sector space exploration and orbital industry. In 15-20 years we’ll be able to better evaluate how things have gone.
Sorry to keep you waiting on this, but I didn’t want to do this off the cuff. You’ve given me thinking material for weeks worth of blog posts, so I tip my hat to you.
“Mike: My question to you on this count is: Why should the businesses pay (education costs) either? What about the PARENTS? Parents are the ones responsible for the upbringing of their children.”
Tad: My wife home-schooled our youngest daughter until she started high school. My wife and I and our children each attended both public and private schools. In our experiences most of the private schools were better than the public schools, but this may have been due to higher admission standards for the private schools (Rice University, for example).
200 years ago most children were home schooled and they knew what they were going to be when they grew up – boys would be farmers like their dads and girls would be farmers’ wives like their moms. Boys and girls were an economic asset because they were a labor source for their parents’ farms. Now high school graduates can expect to have five to ten career changes in their lifetimes and it is hard to know what to study to prepare for that. Children are not the economic asset to their parents that their great-great grandparents were to their parents.
Austin, Texas, and Palo Alto, California, and surrounding areas have increased in wealth due to the presence of the University of Texas and Stanford University, respectively. Some businesses that benefit from these universities contribute to them in various ways, and probably lobby for legislative support for the state universities. Many corporations have programs to match gifts by their employees to schools. So if you believe in “user fees” more than taxes, that those who benefit the most should pay the most, then employers benefit from their employees’ education more than the parents, so employers should pay more of the cost.
“Tad: The United States has been on the way to (partial) socialism since at least 1775 when the Continental Congress issued paper currency and appointed Benjamin Franklin to be Postmaster General.
Mike: Paper currency that’s backed by an instrument of objective value (i.e. gold) is fine and does not creep us toward socialism.”
Tad: The paper currency was backed by IOUs from the 12 colonies and became essentially worthless. I would expect you, Mike, to prefer money issued by private banks instead of the government because the function doesn’t fit into your definition of minimum core functions. Or does it?
“Mike: SO just to be clear, I am aware, and I am not arguing the concretes, but the abstract of how things SHOULD be.”
Tad: In the abstract the way things should be in a successful organization –
1. There is a mission that the organization does.
2. There is leadership and everyone in the organization is honest and competent.
3. There are rules that are followed and incentives so that what is good for the individuals in the organization is also good for the organization and vice versa.
4. The organization increases the happiness of its owners, employees, customers, suppliers and community.
Sorry, Randal, for being off-topic again. How about we give the national forests back to the Indian tribes to make up for the all the treaties the government broke with them? They seemed to do a pretty good job for thousands of years before the Forest Service.
Tad, I wouldn’t worry so much about being off-topic, as this discussion is well within the bailiwick of a blog about government planning. 🙂
In general I do not disagree with your assessment of the evolution of public education. In fact, I suspect the reason we haven’t seen businesses paying the cost of education on a wide scale (as opposed to with select scholarships, etc, as they currently do) is because it simply hasn’t come up as an option. Generally, no private entity is going to voluntarily pay a bill the government is already paying. In a world where education was privatized, it might be sufficiently quantifiable benefit to, say, Microsoft, to be funding schools that teach mathematics, the hard sciences, and engineering tech. My primary issue isn’t whether they’re doing it at all, but whether they are being Forced to do it. If the government isn’t forcing them to do it, the government isn’t overstepping its purpose.
Money of objective value could be issued by anyone, and as long as its value was verifiable, it would be equally valid. A Soviet ruble coin made of 100g of pure gold would have an equal objective value to an American dollar coin made of 100g of pure gold. Because of the (relative) scarcity of gold as a fugitive resource, it is acceptable for banks to stow the gold and issue currency backed by it — and to facilitate the government’s own funding, and to the extent that securing the gold supply is a military imperative consistent with protecting the property (individual rights) of the public, it is within the legitimate scope of government to do the same. In my postulated “minimalist government,” this would be within the scope of the activities of the Dept of the Treasury, the existence of which was already necessary to manage the costs of government.
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