Looking back in history we can see a number of examples where we entered into policies that we thought would have good results and began with the best of intentions and yet today we see the results have, if anything, made the problems we sought to solve even worse.
Forty years ago we were in the midst of the Great Society agenda of President Lyndon Johnson. Swept in on a wave of liberalism the Congress followed him into a wide range of new programs intended to resolve the horrible face of poverty as well as the many problems of the inner cities.
Two programs that were passed during that period led to a major increase in urban planning and aid for federal housing programs and a major expansion of the welfare state with policies that helped to provide support to families and children It was hoped that the urban planning programs could provide good housing for the inner city poor while the social programs would allow families to provide for their children and also help women trapped by economic circumstances in bad relationships.
Unfortunately these great intentions did not exactly pan out the way they intended. The urban planning and housing programs simply moved people from small homes and apartments with some crime into large projects with massive amounts of crime. People who had felt pride of ownership in their small house/apartment now felt nothing for the impersonal towers of stone, leading to a breakdown in the neighborhood.
Churches that had once been the social hub of the community were now far less able to provide support to tens of thousands of people in some of these towers.
Similarly, while the new aid programs did provide important help to people in need of support these programs have, according to many inner city activists, led to a further breakdown in the family unit in the largely Afrcian American urban communities. When you look at how the divorce and illegitimacy rates have soared over the last 40 years it is hard to argue with this point.
Now I am not going to argue that many of these programs have not been helpful, indeed we did have unacceptable levels of poverty in many parts of our country and it is important to make sure that we help as much as possible. But it is also true that large scale government programs sometimes create new problems while solving the old ones.
The same kind of mistakes helped get us into our current problems. As far back as the 1970?s there was discussion of how important it was to help the average family get into the arena of home ownership. During the 80?s and 90?s programs were put into place to encourage this goal. Programs like Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac helped people who could not otherwise afford homes purchase them.
The problem of course was if the people could not afford the homes then getting them into properties was creating a time bomb ready to explode sometime in the future. The same thing can be said for deregulation, the idea that helping to cut back on regulation to allow business to expand was a good one but not when that deregulation went too far.
And of course the worst part of all of these examples, from the 60s through today is that they all had broad bipartisan support. Many Republicans backed Great Society programs and the policies under President Clinton to expand home ownership. Similarly, many Democrats backed deregulation and the loose rules at Fannie and Freddy. The few voices of dissent, if any, were generally fairly meek.
I bring all this up because I think it is important for President Obama and his team to move carefully in passing new programs to deal with problems that face us today.
Many on the left are pushing for significant expansion of government power in most of the economic sphere, with agendas for everything from National Health Care to huge stimulus packages to massive new regulations of just about everything along with a variety of other new programs.
Many on the right are opposing all of this on instinct, calling for even more tax cuts and opposing any new spending as well as questioning any new regulatory programs.
Arguments can be made for both sides of the debate, and it will likely end up that we pass some mixture of these proposals, but the most important thing is that we look very carefully at how policies like this have worked out in the past and consider how they might work in the future.
Large government programs often cause more problems than they solve, yet simply counting on the ‘free market’ to take care of things has not exactly worked out over the past 50 years.
I have no doubt that everyone from left to right has the best intentions for our nation, the key is to take things carefully and accept that sometimes your side is right, and sometimes the other side has the solution.