Government: a strange buffet
Political ·Thursday December 24, 2009 @ 05:47 EST (link)
(This has some similarities to Russell Roberts' "strange restaurant" in "If You're Paying, I'll Have Top Sirloin"; I read his essay in David Boaz's The Libertarian Reader about a month after writing this, but I think my analysis is a little different and goes further.)
Government, and all its services, is like a buffet that everyone must pay for daily. You're charged based on what you make, but you still get the same food. You don't have to eat at it, but you must pay for it. Three quarters of the buffet consists of bananas (for sake of example—my wife doesn't like bananas; substitute something you won't eat), because they're cheap. Every third Tuesday, the first 10 people that show up might get some steak, but probably not, because the restaurant owner tends to serve it to his friends in the back room. Lines are always long and the food tends to be cold, but you can survive on it if you must. Most people prefer to eat elsewhere—but they're still charged for the buffet: in fact, they pay more than most towards its support.
You can choose the restaurateur every few years, but the buffet itself doesn't change when you do. The restaurateur has some control over the buffet—he may add or remove a banana; he may increase the fees, or occasionally even decrease them by a penny or two. But he's not going to improve the overall quality of the establishment, because he has no reason to do so; he gets paid either way. He may hang out a new sign—a picture of a donkey or an elephant, say—but it won't mean anything.
Some people really like the buffet, though. It occasionally serves their favorite food, and they pay less for it than they would elsewhere because it's expensive to import (and demand for it is low—normal people just don't buy all that much escargot). The restaurateur keeps providing these imported foods despite the expense, because the people that eat it help him get re-elected. And he keeps buying bananas because they're cheap and a large group of people that can't do any better will eat them and throw him their support, too.
Now, ideally, we'd dispense with being forced to pay for the buffet, and select what and how much we want to eat (and pay for it) at a restaurant, or if we want to prepare it ourselves, or hire a chef to do it for us at home, at the grocery store. But it's tough to do that when we're forced to subsidize this poor quality and overly expensive buffet restaurant, so the grocers and other restaurateurs suffer despite offering a better product at a better price; and so, we all suffer for the greed of a bunch of monkeys who cannot see beyond the supply of free bananas and some special interests who get gourmet imports on the cheap.
