trying to write a real essay again.

Government sucks at solving problems -- the government workers don't want their reason for employment to go away after all. I feel like this deserves a good write-up. I would guess it has been covered before by really good writers like Sowell or even "Ace" but I haven't read it lately.

Case in point: The EPA. The EPA actually did solve the pollution problems that led to its formation. Problem is that they did not want to shrink into just a small watchdog agency to ensure compliance with the necessary regulations written up to Oh lets just say 1980 since I don't want to research for hours trying to identify the point at which additional regulations became more about finding reasons to expand the agency vs addressing serious pollution.

But the most insidious damage is when a government agency is created to address a social problem like poverty. Now if the Catholic church or the Lutheran Aid society etc decides to take on providing for those who cannot take care of themselves, they would like to be able to eliminate or at least greatly reduce the number of people in need at some point so they can build a nice cathedral or something like that with those dollars, and the volunteers can go fishing or attend bible classes etc instead of spending their time handing out the aid indefinitely. Thus they have incentives to teach life or job skills as needed and to attach some social stigma to capable adults who are taking aid for years on end.


However when the government creates a agency to provide for poor people they hire bureaucrats to staff the agency. These bureaucrats don't want to lose their jobs. Even if the front line staff burn out, the managers at the top want the agency to continue to exist and even to expand. Thus they may offer various life and job skills classes but unless you can earn this much (almost always more than entry level or minimum wage jobs) you are basically working for free since you will lose a dollar of benefits for every dollar you earn. Congress did not set up hard cut-offs when they authorized this or that kind of assistance -- the only reason not to have a sliding scale where your aid is only cut by oh lets say 10 cents per dollar and someone with only the 'aid' be in a situation of being worse off than a median wage earner is to continue the need to have all that staff overseeing all that aid so the middle manager and on up bureaucrats have job security.