Freedom and Government: An Interview with Tibor R. Machan (Part 2)
Freedom and Government:
An Interview Tibor R. Machan (Part 2)
Q: But I think people feel safer knowing the government is checking the airplanes and the meat and. . .
MACHAN: Some people do, but they're deluded.
Q: Government isn't robbing people?
MACHAN: It's seizing wealth from us. It is seizing our income. Seizing is just a nicer way of saying it.
Q: Well, we willingly pay taxes.
MACHAN: That's a myth. Just go out and survey people. Do they willingly pay taxes or do they pay taxes because they're afraid to go to jail?
Q: It's called a voluntary tax.
MACHAN: Oh, that's a crock, a "voluntary taxation"—then it wouldn't be a taxation, it might be a fee. What happens is that if you don't pay you're going to be fined. Now, if you try to run away from that fine, they're going to send the cops after you. If you try to resist the cops, then you're going to be shot.
Q: And your conclusion from that is?
MACHAN: That it is robbery.
Q: So, that's not voluntary?
MACHAN: No, it's not voluntary. It's the last thing voluntary means that you reach into your pocket and you give even if you don't have to, that's what voluntary means. When you give to the Salvation Army or give to the United Fund, you're not going to jail you if you don't give. They have to ask you. These guys [the government IRS agents] don't ask you, they order you to give.
Q: So, if this is robbery, we should refuse to pay?
MACHAN: They're stronger than us and they'll put us into jail and that way they'll shut us up, so we better pay and keep arguing against them.
Q: Some people refuse to pay.
MACHAN: That's probably a situation that they have to judge for themselves, there's no way to tell how people ought to resist the government's petty tyrannies but on the whole, in a relatively free and open society where you can still argue about these things, it is better to keep your situation open to argue rather that go to jail and be a martyr.
Q: Thank you.
Q: The water system in New Jersey we're looking at, emergency vehicles in Florida, a highway in California—what should the government privatize or try to privatize and why?
MACHAN: Essentially "privatization" means to restore to the free society things that the government has no business doing in the first place. Just because we got used to the governments doing them doesn't mean that it's appropriate for the government to do them. So, basically everything other than police, courts and national defense, should be in the hands of private associations, corporations, volunteer group[s], church groups, whatever. We are intelligent enough as human beings to figure out ways to do that without having to resort to the means that government is good at using, namely force. The only place where government should operate with it's special tool, force, is in retaliation against crime. Everything else, whether it's farming or building roads or [the rest] can be done by private initiative. "Private initiative" may be a little bit misleading because [often] it's a social or community initiative. It's lots of people getting together but without using coercive force on each other to solve problems in society. There is a great deal of promise in that. It doesn't mean that it always works perfectly but neither does anything that government does. We should compare it to other societies in which governments do almost everything, socialism, fascism [or communism] and recognize that one of the reasons that the United States tends to be ahead on most counts is that it happens to have more [individual] freedom than any other society. That means more private initiative.
Q: Is the private sector going to do it generally better than the government, you think?
MACHAN: Yes. It's just like asking, "Are free people going to do things better than slaves?" except not by the drastic measure of complete slavery but by being pushed around, manipulated, regimented. Human beings do things better when they are on their own initiative than when they are being pushed around by others. That goes generally for everything except when it comes to dealing with initiated force. When somebody attacks you. How to respond to that needs to be adjudicated and guarded by law. That's what due process is. That's what law is for. But law is not for cooking meals, running restaurants, opening of farms. That's what human cooperation is about.
Q: We met with Irwin Schiff who says [you don't need to pay taxes]
MACHAN: Right.
Q: Irwin and [certain] groups in the country say don't pay your taxes. You're saying this is government's stealing us blind.
MACHAN: That's right. The government is stealing us blind but it still is not so severe a tyranny that it would perhaps justify a revolution, an overthrow of the government. I don't know about Schiff's story, I cannot imagine how I could escape paying taxes, since I work for a company and for a university and for a think tank, which [withholds] taxes. [They are forced to] do the government's extorting from me what is mine and in order for me to resist that, I would have to get these companies on my side and there is no way I can do that. I don't know how he does it and I don't want to really comment on that.
Q: Do you think he's morally right?
MACHAN: Yes, if they can win, if they don't have to sacrifice their liberty, if they're not going to be martyrs, I wish them well with their tax resistance, tax dodging, tax evasion because I consider this extortion by the government. Now, extortion sometimes works: you don't say no to the extortionists because they come and burn down your building. This is what they do to you if you don't pay your taxes. They put you to jail. They confiscate your wealth, your income. So, it's not always advisable to do the resistance. But if you can do it, I think it's morally admirable to do it.
Q: Government housing, [Is it not a] great idea, a lot of people just can't afford a place to stay and they're helping them out?
MACHAN: But not at other people's expense, that's not help . . . that is transfer of wealth from one part to the other at the point of a gun, that is not admirable, that is not charity, that's not compassion. Even if it accomplishes some good one usually doesn't see the bad things that it accomplishes because one cannot measure the damage that's been done to those from whom the income was taken and transferred to these other people. Even if there is some good involved, that is just not the way to do good amongst free men and women.
Q: And what's the quality of what this product is that they're putting out when they do this?
MACHAN: Well it's usually a mess because when you accomplish these ends, with such resistance [to the] bureaucratic meddling, the outcome tends to be disastrous. That's clearly the case with most of the public housing projects.
Q: Here, people are given a chance to own some things maybe for the first time in their life. Is there any bonus to that?
MACHAN: Of course there has been a fairly clear association between responsible use and ownership whereas there is a tragedy of the commons when people don't own things but use public facilities, public resources. They tend to deplete them. They tend to overuse them and there is shortage and all of those consequences follow. So ownership and responsibly have a very strong association. It's not a necessary connection but it's a very strong association both history and theory shows this.
Q: The jobs programs we visited—do you have any idea how successful government jobs programs are because we visited a private one in Maryland that's going great guns. It's really like a person ministry and he's having like a 70 percent success rate 'cause he cares, 'cause he's right there. He's available to the people all the time. How do you know anything about comparison as a businessman?
MACHAN: No partly because I tend to oppose these things on principle not piecemeal. I perfectly well recognize that some isolated successes can arise out of government activity, just like sometimes when you use force on somebody, it may do some good. But it's not to be made into a federal policy. It's not to be generalized. It's not to be regularized. So I tend to be against it even when you can show me occasional success stories.
Q: Charities, somebody comes up with a great idea in the neighborhood, our hobo [ph] are guys down there helping the homeless. They're people feeding people in another part of the country.
MACHAN: Right.
Q: Why not come in and throw some more of the government clout and the government money and stuff behind these people and help out a great idea?
MACHAN: Because that's not the government's job to do this. I mean there are a lot of things that people could do with force that they shouldn't do and government has the force sometimes to step in and it looks very attractive because people are urgent, they're panicky, they're always asking for instant solutions. It's the wrong way for government to act. It's an abrogation, its kind of what you call governmental malpractice.
Q: You know Delancey Street.
MACHAN: Yes.
Q: [H]ere government is taking these people and it hasn't helped. They've thrown them in jail, they've put them through some government programs and what do you think about how government deals with that 2 percent and is there a better way to do it, things like Delancey Street or ...
MACHAN: There is historical evidence that if the government did not do these things, people would do it on their own initiative. That government doesn't do such a great job and government usually costs a lot more than private efforts to do these things. There is no question that on occasions the government comes and [what it does] looks very good, usually because people only concentrate on what the accomplishments are and never follow through on investigating the costs. But, even on the rare occasions when governments do something genuinely good, the means they deploy to do it are abhorrent.
Q: Anything on private aviation or anything that you want to conclude on...
MACHAN: Part of the problem is that when the government gets into any of these activities, it has to operate by the spirit or letter of the 14th Amendment, which means it has to apply all of the restraints that apply to government activity to these charitable and philanthropic activities. It has to be uniform and the red tape is enormous. If private organizations do that, they can do it their way and sometimes, this may not be to everybody's taste. For example a women's group may decide only to give money only to women and not to men. A men's group may want to give money only to men but not women. Government can't do that because it'll be accused of being discriminatory. That is a major impediment of government doing things as is required to be done on the local front you know.
Q: What about the great programs of Social Security, Medicare, it's unthinkable to have America today without them.
MACHAN: It was unthinkable in most of Europe that the private enterprise should run television and radio. Eventually they learned better. Privatization always is difficult at first because people are wedded to these programs. They become used to them. It's like a bad habit, it's very difficult to get rid of but nevertheless, once you've tried it, once you've weaned your way from the government, then you realize that private initiative accomplishes these things much more effectively, at much less cost than government does.
Q: So, what would people be better off, worse off if we didn't have Social Security? I mean people love Social Security, they think they would be back in the Depression era circumstances without it.
MACHAN: You know I mean . . .
Q: The old people freak out when people talk about getting rid of it.
MACHAN: I mean some people do like the idea that others make them do the right thing because they fear that they wouldn't do that of their own initiative but even in a free society, you can establish institutions, where they automatically withhold part of your income and place it into a trust fund or an annuity. The Social Security system whatever is of value in it can be completely achieved in a private system. There is no need for the government to do this. Aside from the fact that it's wrong for the government to do that. That's not what its function is.
Q: Talk about how the function of government has changed from the founding to now. I mean how do people look at government today?
MACHAN: I am not convinced that all of the things that those of us who are very, very suspicious of government extending its power over the rest of society, were on the minds, was already on the minds of the founders. Maybe they had an inconsistent conception of implementing the principles or the Declaration of Independence. Suffice to say that generally
Q: But, briefly, what did people used to think the purpose of government was?
MACHAN: Well, I can't, you know there are a lot of people, there were kings and there were czars and there were pharaohs and caesars, who thought the purpose of government is to make the people do the right thing or to follow a certain god or to fulfill the revolutionary goal of history. The founders tended to believe that government should be restricted. It should be limited to the function of securing our rights. Now, whether they did this consistently or not is not the issue. That's what they said. That's what inspired the revolution. That's what inspired millions of people across the world to look up on America as the leader of the free world. Free world meant individuals can be free in that society, more so than anywhere else. Why? Because the government stuck to the business of protecting people's individual rights.
Q: L.B.J. when he started HUD, he said, every man should belong to a community. Every man should be able to find security in his own community.
MACHAN: Yes. Everyone should belong to a community of his or her own free will and not be conscripted into a community. This is what a lot of communitarians forget, community is wonderful. Without community, human beings would be nowhere near as well off as they are. But if they are forced into the community, they are worse off than if they were on a desert island living as hermits.
Q: Well I don't know if these people aren't conscripted into public housing. They're thrilled because they didn't have anything before.
MACHAN: The people who support public housing are conscripted to support it right? Sot there is a form of conscription involved here. The people who are living in public houses very often are people, who have been displaced by eminent domain; by other things that government does that ruins the neighborhood for them to live in.
Q: Now Andrew Coumo is changing the way public housing is done. He has a new plan, instead of doing high rises, they're going to do town homes and they're mixing it up. They're putting millions on it and there are going to do mixed neighborhoods, where they have a public housing town home next to a fair market middle class next to a fair market middle upper class. They're going to have these new neighborhoods.
MACHAN: Probably will suit some people, it probably will be the construction unions would love it and the construction firms will love it because they got more business thrown their way. But on the whole, whenever government does these things, it's just reshuffling the old cards. The outcome tends to be the same, namely, you get people to depend on it. You get people, whose business depends on it. You reduce private initiative in the society and that is a kind of addiction. It's very, very bad.
Q: You had said this thing on the phone about everyone thinks they have their sort of winning recipe. I mean ...
MACHAN: Yeah.
Q: We've had all these scandals in HUD. I mean should we believe Andrew Coumo when he says he finally has just the calculus to deliver?
MACHAN: My test of whether a scheme has promise, first and foremost is whether it involves any use of force, coercion and if it does, that's wrong. Now, it's just like in personal relations. There are many, many ways to interact with other people, but one way is out. That is to beat them up or to force them to do things. After you have dropped that, there are millions of ways that you can't even think of. Why not give that a chance as opposed to conceive of these schemes of coercive solutions. That is what is so sad about these people, who have this faith in government. They fail to realize that at the heart of their solution lies a cancerous ingredient and that is coercive force.
Q: So, what do you say to the single mom, who doesn't have any family to help her, who doesn't have any community support and who has nowhere to go?
MACHAN: Well you're setting it up in such a way that there is not much I can say. But usually when people do not expect the government to do things, they tend to be reasonably generous toward their fellow human beings. They'll look out, they have a charitable organization, they'll have a church; they'll have a service organization that looks out for the benefit of these people. I am not certain in every case that this will work but it doesn't work the way the government does it anyway. I would like to give the free initiative of people a greater chance at solving these problems than they have now.
Q: So, are people less charitable now because they expect the government to be taking care of these problems?
MACHAN: In a sense, yes. Clearly, I mean I notice that in myself, I give a pretty good amount of money to Doctors Without Borders and Americare, but once in a while, I say, gee, they are taxing me for all these people and I have children to feed and send to college and so forth and so on, so probably I should keep more than I would ordinarily keep.
Q: Is government destructive of charity or does it change the way people think because we're relying on government?
MACHAN: Well judging by the people I know myself, my friends and neighbors, that does amount to a fairly serious impediment to private giving because people think, "Hey, we've already been taken from for these purposes, so what about our purposes, the goals that we have—the feeding and the clothing of our children, the sending them to a good school, buying them a decent car, buying them good medical coverage? So, we probably shouldn't give more, since the government has taken it from us and that means that we don't have enough to spend on our goals." If the government didn't take it, I think there would be a great deal more charity and benevolence—genuine benevolence, because government is never charitable, generous or benevolent because what is involved in government giving is government taking. Bill Clinton, when he feels your pain, doesn't reach [into] his own pocket and give you medicine to alleviate that pain. He picks my pocket to do that.
Q: [What about eminent] domain, we're profiling a case in New Rochelle, New York . . .
MACHAN: Eminent domain [today] is a travesty.
Q: Where they've condemned a whole neighborhood to build an Ikea superstore so that the City Council says only the impartial government can look at the big picture scenario and private residence owners and private businesses, they're just worried about milking their own little plot for what it's worth for them. So, isn't it a good idea to have this sort of someone looking out for the bigger picture?
MACHAN: No. Generally speaking it has been proven a long time ago that top down allocation of valuable resources in a community is a failure. You cannot calculate the proper allocation without people having the freedom to decide for themselves what they want. You can only allocate things as some people see it. But it doesn't suit other people. Moreover, eminent domain in a free society is supposed to be confined to taking private property for genuine, bona fide public use. That means if there is a courthouse that needs to be built, a police department or a military base that needs to be built, fine. But not to hand over property from one owner to another business, which some people deem to be more valuable to the community.
Q: How much does government take from taxpayers and what are they missing because of it?
MACHAN: It's very difficult to tell what you are missing if you are never even allowed to get a glimpse of what you would have. It has now become routine. Every year, way after tax day, the 15th of April, there comes a day when you finally have paid the government. Then you start paying yourself and your goals and your purposes and your obligations. That's one of the reasons that most of us don't notice this. It's a little bit like in Europe: for example, when you buy things the sales tax is not spelled out. You basically think that you are buying something for this amount of money. In America, on the other hand, you have a figure [showing the cost] of something you buy and then they add the sales tax but that's the only place where you can really become aware of the taxes that you pay. Ordinarily you don't—most people, for example, get a check and they look at the net amount and that is their pay. But if you look at the stub and you see all the deductions, then you begin to be aware of what you could be doing and that's very difficult to track. It's very difficult to point to the thing that you don't have, whereas politicians can always point to the dams, the monuments, and the arenas that they have built with the things that they've looted from you.
Q: I mean hypothetically what kinds of things are missing from people's lives?
MACHAN: That is so difficult to tell—it depends who you are, on the sort of things that you would want to do. You might be an inventor or artist, who doesn't have enough paint or doesn't have enough canvas or cannot hire enough musicians to do back-up. There are so many alternative ways in which people might perfectly sensibly spend their money on very productive things and yet, they never get a chance to even think about it. You are robbing the society if you want to put it in that sort of terms of enormous resources by failing to deploy all of these people's inventiveness and ingenuity in allocating their wealth to worthy projects. You're failing to do that. Instead, you are sending the resources to Washington and have a bunch of people way away determine what these resources ought to go to.
Q: But if people kept that tax money, they'd just buy more stuff for themselves.
MACHAN: That's not necessarily true. They could very well by stuff for themselves or for their children [or] send it to the likes of Mother Teresa—they could be doing all kinds of things. People are not greedy all the time, they're not selfish all the time; they are not [always indulging in trivial] buying habits. Very often they would be buying paint for their next art projects, flowers for their gardens.
Q: Everyone has their own thing that they need their money for.
MACHAN: What I was pointing out is that you cannot photograph [or depict] things that aren't there. That's very difficult for a medium like television to have viewers focus on. That's why I refer to the 19th century French political economist Frederick Bastiat, who actually had a theory to this effect. It predated television. But it's really true that when you're talking about the losses that people suffer from taxation, it's difficult to document this. Because if you ask them what they would have done, well, they never even had a chance to really seriously think about this. So, they may be making things up. They may be trying to look good and so, they say things, "Oh, I would have given it to my grandmother or something." Whereas in fact they might have spent it on some trivial pursuit. The point is that not trusting them is the crime, not letting them allocate their resources as they see fit and giving that power to others, who didn't earn that income, who didn't have it to start with, that is the crime. Not so much that maybe those people in the bureaucracy always have bad ideas. No, they all don't always have bad ideas. It's very nice to have classical music on PBS. I like it, I listen to it. I watch PBS. But the point is that it distrusts the people from whom those funds were taken. It places that authority in other people's hands. That shouldn't happen in a free society.
Q: [What about] this idea that people always say that government should spend less but never in their district.
MACHAN: That's right.
Q: Government has expanded and has these huge responsibilities now or it runs all these programs. Is it behaving unconstitutionally and if not, then what's really wrong?
MACHAN: Specifically the Constitution does not authorize the government to do almost 80 percent of what it does now. However, of course, courts would twist and turn the Constitution in such a way that they do authorize governments and then the governments can say, well the courts interpret the Constitution this way. We may do it. But we can criticize that and that's [what] we're doing here. We're criticizing how the courts have expanded the scope of government. Government now can enslave some people to serve other people and this is wrong. I don't care even if it's constitutional—it's wrong. It shouldn't happen. I have a right to say that and I'm arguing that it shouldn't happen. The fact is that when people believe that they're entitled to unemployment compensation, to Social Security, to health care benefits and so on and in fact, these have to be provided by other people—either directly as doctors and nurses and educators or indirectly as taxpayers plunging these people—that places these other people into involuntarily servitude. In other words, [they're made to do] work that they did not choose to perform and that is wrong. I don't care whether it's Constitutional or not, the simple fact that a Constitution has been interpreted to authorize the government to do that doesn't make that right. There should have [been] wiser interpretations, more sensitive to certain individual rights. I would maintain that if you were consistent with the fundamental tenants of the American political tradition these developments would not have occurred at the judicial level.
Q: OK and what about this idea that everyone says in general, let's cut government but then everyone wants their Congressman to bring home the bacon and they want their favorite program, whether it's breast cancer or...
MACHAN: It's very difficult to wean people from these things that they have been told [they're entitled to]; most people are not political theorists. Most people don't think the implications of the Declaration of Independence through. They see the system [of welfare and subsidies] there and they grab whatever they can from that system. If the system allowed them to take their neighbor's fruits off their fruit trees, they would probably get used to that and say, it's my fruit, you know. Unfortunately, that's what happens but that's why political arguments go on and I am trying to dissuade them from continuing to think that way
Q: OK, but are they stupid or are they hypocrites or . . .
MACHAN: They're inconsistent, they're shortsighted; they apply general principles that they don't follow through in specific cases. A lot of people do that. People condemn certain politicians for lying and then they go home and lie to their children. Now people are not perfect, and I'm not maintaining that it's [all] going to be changed overnight but it ought to be thought through carefully and maybe we should lean in the direction of changing rather than continuing it.
Q: And [what is the] tragedy of the commons?
MACHAN: [It refers to] a principle that had been identified many centuries ago by Aristotle in his book The Politics but it was resuscitated by a biologist at the University of California at Santa Barbara named Garrett Hardin in an article called "The Tragedy of The Commons," in the December 1968 issue of Science magazine. This theory identifies a serious problem with individuals using common resources like air, like water or like a grazing area that is commonly held. Usually, if there are no limits, budgetary limits or property right limits defining what belongs to whom, people will grab whatever they can as fast as they can and therefore, deplete their resources. They will not replant. They will not refurbish, they will not heed, conserve, preserve, they will just grab. This happens very often with the public treasury; people grab whatever is in there because they think it's theirs. It's just like the freeways; people go on the freeways thinking the freeways are free. They'll be enormous congestion and people will not even be able to use the freeways but they all think they are getting a free good. So, this is a very serious problem with anything that is public, whether it's a public beach or a public forest or the public treasury. If you had restraints which are provided by the right to private property where borders are around what is yours and what is theirs, then you knew, you would know how to allocate these things. You would know how to prudently use the resources that are, are yours and then cultivate new resources and act more responsibly. Again, there is no guarantee but the likelihood is far greater than otherwise.
Q: But if you did that, you'd get only rich people, who could drive on the LA freeway
during rush hour and poor people wouldn't get to go to work.
MACHAN: As a matter of fact, the poor and the rich change places a great deal in a free society. They are not stable classes, not like in a monarchy, not like in feudalism. Some people are rich for a while and then they are not so rich and then they become poor and it turns topsy turvy all over because people are sometimes investing resources in one thing that pans out and other things that don't pan out. So, yes, there will be differences, equality of conditions is not the priority of a free society. Its freedom of action that is the priority. In that way; poor people can learn how to become rich people and rich people could neglect how to stay rich people. We should bash the rich for a little while.
Q: We should?
MACHAN: In the following way, a great many government programs benefit established corporations, industries that think that they're entitled to this. Very often unfortunately, defenders of the free market focus on unwed mothers and the recipients of welfare rather than the really big guys, who are the greatest rip off artists, who have the big lobbies in Washington.
Q: What, give us some examples I mean . . .
MACHAN: For example—almost all of the industries that advertise abroad get half of the costs of their advertising paid by the American taxpayer. There are all kinds of price support programs for major agro business. There are loans; there are subsidies for all kinds of business. There are projectionist measures that protect American textile firms from competition from abroad. This is insidious. This costs the consumer enormous amounts of money and generally speaking, puts big business on the dole. So, it's not really the unwed mothers, who are the beneficiaries of the welfare state. It tends to be humongous industries and workers in those industries and the executives in those industries. You have to remember that the welfare state is largely welfare for those who have power to extract the welfare from Washington. That tends to be people who make the contributions. There's all this talk about campaign finance reform. The only legitimate campaign finance reform is the abolition of the welfare state. Anything else is going to be circumvented by top lawyers, legal departments and industries and lobby groups and they're going to get their pound of flesh from Washington no matter what.
Q: This is a great point but I don't think most people are going to follow you from A to B.
MACHAN: Well campaign finance has to do with people paying politicians in the hopes that when the politicians get elected, they will distribute the wealth that they have collected from everybody to the people who have made the biggest donations. Now, campaign finance reform promises to remedy this but it can't as long as the handouts continue. They're too damn attractive. People will always find some way to funnel money to those from whom they expect money in return. I don't care what John McCain wants and I don't care what anybody wants, as long as there is a welfare state, there will be people who try to buy politicians to funnel the money from the government to their enterprises.
Q: I think welfare state might not register with most people.
MACHAN: Of course the welfare state means the welfare state is a kind of system in which the government takes money and hands it to people for the sake of their welfare. This creates entitlement programs, benefit programs, subsidies and so on. Because of this system, a lot of people pay politicians so that when they get elected; they would funnel that money that the welfare state allocates to these people to them. That is impossible to stop as long as the system continues because they'll find some way to try to influence the politicians.
Q: And so, the answer is . . .
MACHAN: The answer is to cut out the government handout programs and restrain the government to do its proper business and that is to protect our rights and not to be our Santa Claus, our nanny, and our uncle.
Q: Earlier you kept talking about bureaucrats and wanting to regiment people, it's like with the Indians. What does that mean?
MACHAN: That means that . . .
Q: They sit around and they're control freaks or . . .
MACHAN: Yes, they are, because they have an ideal. This is not because they're vicious monsters but because they have accepted it as their role to guide people's actions just like a military commander, who regiments the troops, bureaucrats guide industry or farming or whatever in terms of a vision that they have of proper behavior. They don't let the individuals forge their own vision. Instead, they step in there and take over as if they were the fathers and the mothers of these people rather than their fellow citizens. This is a major impediment to a free society, some people being in a position of ordering other people how to act.
Q: OK but they're well educated and the Indians are drunk and have 80 percent unemployment.
MACHAN: But if the Indians never realize that they need to learn how to guide their lives, they'll never get educated—ever. In fact, just because you are smarter, it doesn't mean that you are wiser. Bureaucrats may be smarter, better educated, they may have come out of the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard but they are not entitled to run our lives even if we got our degree from Podunk University. This is not a monarchy in which there is an upper class and then we are the lower class. They are equals. Their rights are no more privileged that our rights. I don't have very much to say about the war on poverty. It's sort of implicit in all the things that I say that this is sort of like not the government's business.
Q: that they get off Scot-free . . .
MACHAN: Oh, yes.
Q: I mean the Consumer Protection Agency, they make sure pajamas don't burn and they're doing great stuff for us. The Department of Transportation giving us air bags and child safety seats.
MACHAN: Well in fact, most of the regulatory agencies do not have the incentive structure to do the right thing even at the job that I think they shouldn't have because they cannot be taken to court. They have what is called sovereign immunity that means they can't be sued. Even though the FAA sees a bunch of crashes, despite its responsibility for the safety of airlines, when there is a crash, it's the company that gets sued but not the FAA. Now if you do not have to account for your mistakes, it's not as likely that you're going to be watchful not to make them. Governments have an inherent limitation on actually doing the jobs that they have illegitimately assumed now because they cannot be held accountable. There's a widespread phenomenon in a capitalist society that most people don't value highly enough that when capitalist industries do something wrong, they can be held liable. You can go to court and sue them and they payoff huge sums. But when a state industry does something wrong, wrong, it can't be sued. When Union Carbide did that disaster in India, it paid big time. When the Mexican government did that disaster in Mexico City with its oil tanks, it gave out token payments to those who suffered the damage; because they were not private industry they couldn't be sued.
MACHAN: I remember this very well because it happened very close to each other and, I don't exactly [know] what to say about it. I don't know the other ones that well, but this [one] I paid attention to. I wrote a piece on it and it was a very clear case of how when private industry screws up, it gets penalized severely. Whereas, when government screws up, at most, they resign. Mostly government officials go to jail only if they violate some corruption law. But if they engage in malpractice, nothing happens. But if a doctor engages in malpractice he gets sued and may lose his entire business. May never be able to practice again. So, that's another reason why one should prefer privatization as against state usurpation of what people do, should do for themselves.
Q: Thank you very much.