The Midas Touch

[jts]

I have a question.

Everyone knows the story of King Midas. Everything he touched turned into gold.

Seems to me government has a power like that. Except everything government touches turns into not gold but shit.

My question is:

Is there an exception? Is there anything government touches that does not turn into shit?

[caroljane]

I suspect that you receive some form of disability pension from the government. or have been touched by it in some other form.

What has it turned you into?

[jts]

The question is exceptions, not examples.

[goblueram]

Maybe parks? Or libraries? Ignoring the means of funding these programs of course.

[jts]

The following story is of questionable relevance to the topic but I think it is so fascinating that it is worth telling. And it might even somehow be relevant to the topic.

In the 1960s and 1970s the USA and the USSR had their "cold war". The USSR dominated the world of chess. After Botvinnik got the world title in 1948, every world title match had been between 2 Soviet players. They figured they owned chess. They used chess as communist propaganda. They said no capitalist country will ever produce a world chess champion. They said we have the best chess players and this proves (they said) that socialism is better than capitalism. The Soviet Union had more than half of the world's chess grandmasters.

Everyone who knew Bobby Fischer was agreed on 2 things about him:

1. He was a genius.

2. He was crazy.

Maybe there was a connection between these 2 facts. Maybe some kind of imbalance of brain chemistry.

Fischer learned chess at the age of 6. He was so obsessed with chess that his mother was worried about him, that he had no social life and got him into a chess club. At age 11 he got good. At age 13 he played "the game of the century". At age 14 he became USA champion. That's not junior champion; that's whole thing champion. At 16 he quit school; he couldn't see what school had to do with chess; all he wanted to do was play chess. For years Fischer's response to almost anything was "what's that got to do with chess?"

A little snapshot of the personality of Bobby Fischer:

It is 4 AM in the home of grandmaster Larry Evans. The phone rings. At the other end of the phone is the excited voice of Bobby Fischer: "I found the right move!"

When Fischer checked into a hotel, he asked for a room -without- a view. It might distract him from chess.

In 1969, Fischer was supposed to participate in a zonal tournament. In those days the chess world was divided in zones. The USA was one zone. Bobby Fischer had some kind of disagreement and refused to play in the tournament. (Bobby Fischer has been described as temperamental and unpredictable and all that.)

The next year, 1970, Fischer wanted to participate in the interzonal tournament. According to the rules he didn't qualify because he didn't play in the zonal. But how do you tell that to a player who won the USA championship every time he competed for it and had no serious competition in the USA? The organizers decided that Fischer could compete in the interzonal if all those players who would have been his opponents in the zonal give their consent. They all did.

Fischer kicked ass in the interzonal and got into the candidates series in 1971. The candidates series was a series of short matches, winners take on winners until there is a grand winner. The grand winner became the official challenger for the world title.

In round one in the candidates series in 1971, Fischer was matched against Mark Taimanov of the Soviet Union. Fischer beat him 6-0. Six wins, no losses, no draws. A perfect shut-out. Normally the world's best grandmasters were so even matched that most the games were draws. This was not supposed to happen. Well, they said, this never happened before and will never happen again.

In round two in the candidates series in 1971, Fischer was matched against Bent Larsen of Denmark. They called him the great Dane. Bent Larsen was the only chess player in the world besides Bobby Fischer who could give the Soviet players serious competition. Fischer did the same thing to Bent Larsen as he did to Mark Taimanov, beat him 6-0.

At this point in time Fischer had won 12 games in a row, no losses and no draws, against a grandmaster strength opponent, and a strong grandmaster at that. How is this possible? People probably were wondering whether Fischer was human.

In round three, Fischer was matched against Tigran Petrosian, former world champion and the guy that Spassky had to beat in 1969 to become world champion. Petrosian was not impressed by Fischer's winning streak and was confident that he would find a way to stop Fischer. Petrosian had an extremely defensive style and he so rarely lost a game that it was said that he loses 2 games in a row only once in 5 centuries. Fischer himself said that Petrosian could nip an attack in the bud 20 moves before his opponent thought of it. Petrosian snapped Fischer's winning streak. The score was 2.5 - 2.5. (Half a point each for a draw.) Then Fischer picked up another winning streak and won 4 in a row against Petrosian. People were wondering which century they were living in. Final score: 6.5 - 2.5

With that, Fischer was officially challenger in 1972 for Spassky's world title. Remember the Soviets figured they owned chess. And they said no capitalist country will ever produce a world chess champion. In the Soviet Union, unlike the USA, chess was supported by government, taught in the schools. Professional chess players were paid a salary. Fischer was on his own. He had no way to make a living except by chess and it wasn't a salary from the USA government.

Soviet chess grandmasters were expected to play not for themselves but for the Soviet Union. Fischer played for himself.

The Soviet government panicked. They took Fischer seriously as a threat to Soviet domination of chess. The Soviet government gave Spassky a 7 month vacation, gave him his own personal psychologist to get his mind in shape, gave him his own personal physical fitness coach (body and mind go together), got most Soviet grandmasters analyzing Fischer's games to give Spassky advice about how to beat Fischer.

Fischer said: "I'm going to teach the Russians some humility." That sounds like just mouthing off, but he actually did teach them some humility. After Fischer took the title from Spassky in 1972, Soviet domination of chess was broken and they quit using chess as communist propaganda and they quit saying no capitalist country will ever produce a world chess champion.

[jts]

Maybe parks? Or libraries? Ignoring the means of funding these programs of course.

In order to evaluate whether and how much government corrupts parks and libraries, we probably would need an example of a park or a library that is privately owned and for public use and then the government took it over.

[jts]

This video is the kind of thing I had in mind when I started this thread. Government turned education into shit. Education would be much better in a free market. And it's not just education. Is there any industry that government doesn't make worse?

12:20

[syrakusos]

As far as I know no examples exist of the government taking over a business and making it better. To consider libraries and parks, we do not need this library or that park once private, but now government, to compare the outcomes. What is the service that libraries provide? What is the need that parks meet? Also, you have to consider that like government fire departments, government libraries have so completely supplanted any alternative producers that we find it hard to re-imagine the problem.

What government park compares to Disneyland or Disneyworld? Consider that the government has seized the wilderness areas and declared them public lands. Private lands for camping, hunting, etc., do exist, but you have to search them out. Bookstores compete with libraries. You might not think that you can "borrow" a book from a store, but actually, books are sold on consignment. You can return the book - at least for a credit to you - and the store can send it back to the distributor and so on. Then, there are used books by the ton: Half Price Books, Books a Million, but also the Salvation Army and Goodwill. And then there is the Internet. As a professional researcher, I know that Wikipedia is every bit as good as the Britannica.

And you really need to peel back the surface and consider causal factors: libraries do not publish books - they only provide what already was created on the open market. And, in truth, as nice as libraries are - and I confess to being a big fan - they ALL practice "censorship" going heavy on the books they like and light to non-existent on that of which they disapprove. (I served on the 1991 White House Conference on Libraries and Information Services.) And as you know, I work as a security guard. So, myself, I'd rather see a world where libraries are the primary function of government and policing is privatized. That said, though, "government service" is not identical to "legal monopoly.")

Banking is certainly another example of how a private service was co-opted and made worse by government.

(In Uncle Sam: the Monopoly Man from 1972, some examples of privately-operated community fire service were offered. However, the vast bulk of this multi-billion-dollar global industry is squarely on private property. The industry is broad, wide, and huge -- and hugely ignored when your local FD blasts a hole of lights and sirens through traffic in the street. The same with cops. Private security is three times larger than public policing both in manpower and capital investment. But we only see TV shows about public police, while private security is ridiculed by movies like Mall Cop and National Security. Ultimately, however, the solution is not privately employ people to do what public agents do. The real solutions come from preventing problems: that is invisible. In other words, private security succeeds not so much by armed warriors as by gates, locks, and cameras. Fire safety is not so much a matter of guys in trucks as sprinklers and extinguishers in support of good architectural design. Recall that in Fahrenheit 451 the firemen were given the work of censorship when homes became fireproof. It should not be science fiction: building codes prevent innovation.)

Even in the military, innovation comes from the private sector, not the government's army. It has been said that one reason that the Plains Indians were so hard to defeat is that they bought their rifles on the open market while the cavalry was stuck with government issue. Certainly, the archaic Greek city states with their dressed lines marching to flutes, where each man was armored in bronze that he bought for himself, proved a match for the Persian conscripts called "The Immortals" only because the body of men as a group would not be allowed to die as long as the king had farmers to press into service.

In the last Gulf War, groups such as Blackhawk took a lot of criticism in the liberal mass-media. It is ironic for me, as a libertarian, to read academic sociologists lining up with political conservatives when they wring their hands over how private armies have replaced public institutions globally. The "progressives" yearn for the good old days when a million men died in trenches... or, heck, 1987 (Iraq versus Iran here).