Inefficient by Design

Those that lean to the left of the political spectrum (Green Party members in particular), readily agree that the profligate waste of, and the laying waste to, the environment constitutes a moral failing.  Certainly they agree that the grinding of mahogany forests in the Amazon basin for the manufacture of luxury toothpicks would be a moral outrage.  Thus they agree that the choice to use resources efficiently has a (large) moral component.

I was just reading Adam Smith the other day, specifically chapter eight of book one of his Wealth of Nations.  More than two hundred years ago, Adam realized that per-capita GDP growth is the driver for rising wage rates: “It is not the actual greatness of national wealth, but its continual increase, which occasions a rise in the wages of labour. It is not, accordingly, in the richest countries, but in the most thriving, or in those which are growing rich the fastest, that the wages of labour are highest. … The liberal reward of labour, therefore, as it is the necessary effect, so it is the natural symptom of increasing national weath. The scanty maintenance of the labouring poor, on the other hand, is the natural symptom that things are at a stand, and their starving condition that they are going fast backwards.” 

Those on the left readily agree that a nation full of starving laborers also constitutes a moral failing. Since a rise in real per-capita GNP is a rise in economic efficiency, the left once again agree that the choice to use resources efficiently has a moral component.

Now the immense geniuses that were our founding fathers designed our federal government to be supremely inefficient, ruthlessly inefficient, because efficient governments are the bane of individual liberty. (Dictatorships are efficient, for example.) The founding geniuses realized that for liberty’s sake, you want the design of your government to include equally opposing forces; you want it to drive down the road with one foot on the accelerator while the other stomps on the brake.

And thus those on the left must agree that a moral failing also occurs when a nation hands a large chunk of its GDP to the federal government, and another to the states, which are the most inefficient institutions of our time by design

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