What Your Country Does for You
Government enables your daily life in more ways than you might think
Imagine that you’re a struggling mom or dad in 1858 New York City. You’re trying to keep your two little kids from going hungry, but money is tight. You find a dairy offering milk at a great price, and it looks just as good as your usual, more expensive choice. Soon, your toddlers get horrendously sick. You try everything, including spending money you don’t have on a doctor, but it takes weeks to narrow down the culprit: that cheap milk.
The problem wasn’t milk per se. Rather, the problem in 19th-century cities was unscrupulous distributors buying “swill milk” or thinning good milk with water, then adding substances — everything from relatively harmless molasses to chalk or pureed calf brain(!) — to make it look thicker and fool their customers, much to the detriment of the customers’ health.
However, discovering the bad milk was only the start of the solution back then. People had no recourse, no way to stop the bad sellers, and no way to know which sellers they could trust. Nowadays, we expect government to provide all that for us.
(As I wrote before, I try to differentiate my values from my opinions. Being aware of the difference helps us listen with more open minds.)
My value: Government should treat its citizens fairly and ensure that citizens also treat one another fairly.
My opinion: Modern society enjoys immense freedom and prosperity because it has government to mediate conflict between, provide services to, and promote the well-being of its members.
Early protection rackets
People since the dawn of time have chosen to ally themselves with someone who offers protection from threats. Those threats could have been lions and tigers, rival people groups, or even the landscape and weather. Someone stood up to take charge, and they provided some help — usually at the cost of having to obey that person’s rules.
Often throughout history, those rules existed for the benefit of the already rich and powerful. Few people were able to rise from poverty to power, and rulers used everything from religion to sumptuary laws to keep people from challenging their positions. If you wanted the (sometimes nominal) protection, or even the relative peace and safety of fitting in, you had no choice but to fall in line.
Crime and punishment
That said, we all want someone to punish crime. Every two-year-old will retaliate when struck. People taking vengeance on their own initiative, however, would lead to escalating violence, deteriorating trust, and an unsafe society — just think of places that get caught up in a gang war.
So when someone takes charge and restores order, they’ve provided a legitimate service. The fear of punishment isn’t perfect, but it does help dissuade people from harming or cheating one another. Our system is hardly perfect; it struggles with mass incarceration, police brutality, killings of police, and more. But I’d still prefer a system whose ideal is having everyone equal before the law, presumed innocent before trial, because then at least we could be working in that direction.
Of course, sometimes that’s overkill. If you’ve been cheated by someone, you’d probably rather get your money back than just see the cheater punished. Thus a civil system, which allows citizens to bring complaints against one another, is also valuable.
Keeping people honest
Going back to the swill milk scandal, the question was how people could make sure they were buying what they thought they were — with nothing poisonous added. Bee Wilson writes,
In the end, New York milk was cleaned up. It took stronger food laws, better policing, the advent of pasteurization and the passage of the Food and Drug Act in 1906, 50 years after the worst of swill milk.
In other words, it took a ton of effort to prevent all the ways unscrupulous people could cheat. History has proven that money is an incredibly effective motivator — enough so that people steal, cheat, swindle, and harm others to get it. John Keane paraphrases Chinese writer Lin Yutang* thus:
…humans are more like potential crooks than honest gentlefolk, and that since they cannot be expected always to be good, ways must be found of making it impossible for them to be bad.
I don’t know anyone today who wonders whether the milk at the grocey store is actually or only milk. We count on government to enforce rules about food and product safety. Regulations also make sure that your meat is safe; that mattress makers haven’t used unsafe or contaminated filler; that advertisements can’t lie; or even that makers of your coffee pot won’t continue selling handles they know can break unexpectedly.
Services you didn’t know you needed
In my 17 years of relatively bug-free living in the Pacific Northwest, I had forgotten how bad mosquitoes get at twilight. After moving to Florida, however, my kids and I went to a park one evening and we could see, hear and feel the mosquitoes eating us alive. I had heard that we lived in a mosquito-control district, so I looked it up online and filed a request. Two days later, a truck came out to fumigate the park area.
That illustrates another benefit of government is coordinating public works and services far bigger than any of us could afford individually.
We drive on public roads, past public schools and parks. Many of us use public sewer systems and drink city water, which has been treated to prevent contamination. You can borrow books, music, and movies in many formats from public libraries, which also provide services like job training, computer access, and tutoring — all made possible because we pool our resources through taxes. We go to restaurants that are inspected by public health, hospitals that are licensed by the medical board, and stores that are required to give everyone the same price.
I’m not saying we can’t keep trying to improve — no matter where you are on the political spectrum, I’m sure there’s something you would change about the existing government. But we shouldn’t take for granted all the ways that the government we elect improves our day-to-day lives. I, for one, don’t want to live without them.
If you found this article interested, I encourage you to check out the rest of Bleeding Heart Liberal.
* from John Keane’s book, The Shortest History of Democracy, referencing Lin Yutang, My Country and My People, William Heinemann, London and Toronto, 1948 (first published 1936), p. 198.
