31. The Disastrous Lessons of Social Engineering

THOSE WHO TRY TO engineer society in a direction contrary to human nature will only become frustrated in their attempts. Forty years and $5 trillion later, the U.S. government’s “War on Poverty” (à la President Lyndon Johnson, 1964) has not only failed, but also has left more poverty in its wake and ruined more families than if the government had simply done nothing.⁵⁴ In his 1984 book, Losing Ground, Charles Murray recounts the tragic consequences that followed the adoption of governmental social policies between 1950 and 1980, and explains why such consequences are predictable wherever welfare entitlement programs are instituted.

The government’s “War on Drugs” (à la President Richard Nixon, 1969) is another example in which social engineering created a lucrative underground economy that fostered more crime and havoc than if the “war” had never begun. The government spends more than $5 billion per month (only the up-front costs) and arrests a drug violator every twenty seconds, on average, resulting in more than five-hundred-thousand arrests during the first four months of 2006.

The War on Drugs has failed abysmally to decrease drug use. Since the beginning of the “war,” the use of illegal drugs has increased in all categories. The “war” was, however, successful in reducing the amount of marijuana being illegally imported into the U.S. As an unintended consequence, drug smugglers turned to cocaine, which was easier to move and gave a much higher profit margin for the weight and volume of their product. It also gave incentive to U.S. marijuana growers, who moved to meet the demand by increasing domestic marijuana production and improving its quality. The disastrous results following the government’s prohibition of alcohol manufacturing, shipping, and sales from 1920 to 1933 should have served as a warning of what to expect when simply substituting the prohibition’s target substance.

The forces of nature that govern health care are no different from those forces that govern other markets. With government engineering our health care, we are well on the way to another catastrophe. Government’s intrusion into health care markets has been pervasive for many years. Today’s escalating health care costs stem from subsidized services and the accumulation of government intervention into nearly every phase of this industry. In a free market, health care, like other goods and services, would be available at a fraction of today’s costs. Consider the computer industry, in which government intervention is minuscule compared to its interference in the health care industry. In the computer industry the complexities are on a par with those of health care, yet we are constantly amazed at the dwindling prices (even with inflated dollars) for mind-boggling increases in performance. Today, virtually everyone can own a computer that just a generation ago only major corporations could have afforded.

Taking government out of the health care business is not likely for some time, but taking oneself out of the government’s health care system is a choice that many patients and health care providers are making. The claim that government must get into the business of providing health care because many people can’t afford it totally misses the point. Many people can’t afford health care because government has gotten into that business. Tommy Thompson, the former Secretary of Health and Human Services, predicts that the annual costs of health care will double today’s $2 trillion by 2013.⁵⁵

The lesson from State-engineered health care, like previous lessons of resulting disasters, will most likely be misunderstood by social planners, because they will not accept nature’s way of telling us that such involuntary means to improve welfare will fail to meet the intended goal, regardless of how it is engineered.

But the saddest of all failures today in the U.S. is State-engineered education, in which the very ideas of social engineering and State eminence are incorporated into the curricula.⁵⁶ Any student who can reason well will be confused between what is proper and improper conduct when they are taught that government people are authorized to act in ways that would be a crime if done by others.

Furthermore, these students will question the moral imperatives that their parents try to instill in them as a guide to a responsible and rewarding life when they see such imperatives violated by those who are revered as heroes in their history books. Aside from these moral conflicts, consider the difficulty in teaching students the benefits of freedom and the free enterprise system—historically known as the “American way.” How can students appreciate the merits of free enterprise when even their schools don’t operate under that system? And while making school attendance compulsory, it cannot then teach liberty and the detrimental effects of coercion. The benefits of freedom and morality are not difficult matters to teach and to understand, but such teachings are virtually impossible in a State school.

Like other government-provided services, education is predictably poor in quality and high in cost. Making matters worse for U.S. public schools is the National Education Association (NEA), the largest labor union in the country, representing 3.2 million public school teachers and support personnel, and the Federation of Teachers, which is an affiliate of the AFL/CIO with one million members. The combination of unions making the termination of incompetent teachers almost impossible⁵⁷ and the difficulty parents face when attempting to transfer their child to a better performing public school accelerates the decline of a failing system. U.S. public schools fall far behind European state schools where parents have the option of choosing which school their child attends. Such choice by parents, although certainly not a free market, does at least provide some competition between State supported schools.

“At age 10, American students take an international test and score well above the international average. But by age 15, when students from 40 countries are tested, the Americans place 25th.”⁵⁸ In 1998, 20,760 K–12 home-schooled students in 11,930 families were administered either the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills or the Tests of Achievement and Proficiency. The achievement test scores of this group of home-schooled students were exceptionally high—the median scores were typically in the 70th to 80th percentile nationally. For example, home-schooled students in grade 3 have a median composite scaled score of 207, which corresponds to the 81st percentile nationwide.⁵⁹

Adjusted for inflation, the cost per student in elementary public schools is about eight times greater than just twenty-five years ago and twenty-five times greater than one hundred years ago.

If government were not in the education business, it seems unlikely that K–12 education would be limited to a brick-and-mortar classroom, one-size-fits-all system, or would even retain those grade designations. The education market is no different from any other market where entrepreneurs and customers come together in numerous and unpredictable ways, and the freer those markets, the more creative and favorable are those ways.

Ironically, the people foisting these programs and policies on us aren’t intending to do harm. Yet harm is being done, since causality is not disposed to comport with one’s good intentions.

State social planners have repeatedly adopted policies that have resulted in catastrophic human sacrifice and suffering that could have been averted had they only sought out a rudimentary understanding of human nature. History is replete with such disastrous experiments, because those who conducted them refuse to accept the notion that there may be common principles of nature behind each of the preceding disasters.

The thirty million deaths from famine in China following the institution of a collective farming policy is so demonstrative an example of these misguided failures that even the most ardent socialists should, from just this single event, reexamine their understanding of human nature. How many more disasters must social engineers witness before they stop experimenting with human lives and conclude that egalitarian policies designed to promote welfare not only do not work, but can not and will not work?

Problems don’t disappear in free markets, of course; they simply are resolved or diminished more efficaciously there than in a system that employs coercion. In free markets, problems invite entrepreneurs to solve them, using solutions that evolve heuristically in an unimaginable variety of ways.

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⁵⁴Michael Janofsky, The New York Times, 9 February 1998.

⁵⁵“Tommy Thompson: America’s Health Care System will Collapse by 2013,” May 16, 2006, by Wayne Hanson. http://www.govtech.com/gt/articles/99517.

⁵⁶California 2nd District Court of Appeals, in a decision that makes home schooling by noncertified teachers illegal, stated that a “primary purpose of the educational system is to train schoolchildren in good citizenship, patriotism, and loyalty to the state and nation as a means of protecting the public welfare.” Case filed February 28, 2008. http://www.courtinfo.ca.gov/opinions/documents/B192878.PDF.

⁵⁷Teacher’s Union Facts. http://teachersunionexposed.com/protecting.cfm.

⁵⁸How Lack of Choice Cheats Our Kids Out of a Good Education,” John Stossel, 20/20 ABC News, January 13, 2006.

⁵⁹Lawrence M. Rudner, “Scholastic Achievement and Demographic Characteristics of Home School Students in 1998. “http://epaa.asu.edu/epaa/v7n8/.