“Social Engineering Ahead” is the warning on a set of billboards sponsored by the Taxpayers League of Minnesota.
The signs, which include graphics of a tangle of train tracks and roads, reportedly are intended to warn people that initiatives such as the light rail line, under construction in Minneapolis, and a proposed commuter line from St. Cloud represent an effort by government bureaucrats to reshape society into their own elitist mold.
Well! Without going into specific pros and cons of non-road transportation projects, the league’s billboards provide an excellent opportunity to discuss how societies provide public goods.
Does government spending always represent some unsullied expression of the will of a majority of citizens? Should it? Do such decisions made by bureaucrats ride roughshod over public preferences? Or are government employees and elected representatives themselves the tools of special interest groups seeking private advantage from public spending?
None of these extremes is true.
The process that is bringing us light rail isn’t substantially different from the one that brought us the interstate highway system in the ’50s or that spread railways across the Upper Midwest more than a century ago. That said, it is good for society to debate not only what goods and services we want government to supply, but also the process by which we identify and rank such needs.
Economists who are anarchists or full-blown libertarians are very rare, indeed. Both history and economic theory teach that societies need a certain level of “public goods” in order to thrive and enjoy wealth. Such public goods include transportation infrastructure, health, education and public safety, the benefits of which are hard to isolate and hard to directly charge recipientsfor.
It is clear that while free markets and nongovernmental civil society may provide some level of such goods — private schools for the wealthy existed from antiquity and insurance companies used to pay private fire companies to protect only their insured houses — only government will provide them in sufficient quantity for society to be as well off as possible.
What is not clear, however, are the highest priority public goods or the most effective ways to meet societal needs. Different citizens and different groups within society will hold different opinions. Human nature being what it is, some will always identify opportunities for private advancement within public spending. The process necessarily is political and often is messy. That is the nature of government and collective public life.
Often, the core arguments boil down to the junior high social science lesson about direct vs. representative democracy. Are we better off if we make all decisions directly by citizens’ votes in town meetings or state referenda? Or, should citizens elect representatives to discuss all the intricacies of spending alternatives, weigh all the considerations involved, and reach bargained compromises between different groups?
I think it is clear that while direct public voting may work in village town meetings or for some issues, it is not optimal for making choices for 5 million Minnesotans or 280 million Americans. While one may personally disagree with decisions made by Congress or the Legislature, the level of decision-making is better than if every voter had a yes-no button on the TV remote and we had a vote every evening just before Leno or Letterman on whether to fund the North Star commuter rail line or bomb Iraq.
Yes, non-road transportation measures such as the Hiawatha light rail line or the St. Cloud commuter train grind their way through the political process the same way roads and bridges do. Yes, special interest groups lobby representatives. Yes, people on public payrolls have personal preferences and their own axes to grind. Yes, some contractors or landowners will benefit and others will lose depending on where the dollars go.
But the same was true when federal and state government subsidized the vast expansion of railroads between the Civil War and World War I. Elected officials were lobbied and even openly bribed. Cabinet members and functionaries considered their own preferences and often their own financial interests in making decisions.
Even so, it is also clear that subsidizing railroads as a means of settling the West and promoting economic growth had broad popular support. U.S. democracy was messy, but it worked.
The same was true after World War II. If funding the interstate highway system had been put to a popular vote in the early 1950s, it probably would not have passed. People generally wanted better roads but would have balked at an honest estimate of the cost.
Contracting firms that had grown enormously with war projects, machinery manufacturers such as Caterpillar, and steel and cement firms spent large sums on lobbying along with truckers. Railroads spent large sums in opposition. Defense officials who had seen the German autobahns pleaded their case publicly and privately. The process was the same as that for light rail transit but on a much larger scale.
Public goods: We cannot do without them, but getting them is a messy process.
© 2002 Edward Lotterman
Chanarambie Consulting, Inc.