Two Legs Bad; Four Legs Good.
How easy it is to have a political philosophy, or is it?
This is a column for the local paper about a landfill wanting to expand and lots of people, often quite politically conservative folk, complaining about what private business is doing.
A lesson I would like everyone to learn is being offered right now in Seneca County. It’s how the shiny faces of “simply truths” are not even a helpful starting point for understanding.
In Orwell’s fable Animal Farm (a criticism of Russian communism) Snowball, the leader of the animals, teaches a “down to earth” version of his philosophy of government. He has the animals all chanting “Four legs good; two legs bad.”
We should not be that kind of animal. Let reality in at the door and such surrogates for thinking will exit at the back.
Example: Bad air and potential sickness clear the political air. Problems like the local landfill, or like the windmills, get people to stop mouthing magic phrases and deal with the real world of conflicting interests, hard problems and the search for solutions. That is, experience teaches us what low or lofty phrases won’t.
Here we have a problem that drives us out of our safe zone, the place where we let slogans do the thinking for us. The rights of private property and the needs of the community collide. We realize that one of our solutions is for government to act. In this case to manage, and/or limit, the actions of private ownership. We find that it is all more complicated than “private ownership good; government bad.”
We see that unregulated use of this land, or poorly regulated use, may be bad for the community. We see, and perhaps learn, that the real world is just … well, COMPLICATED. Of course, the power of government is a power that must be limited. Limited by the people. We call it democracy. And it isn’t a clean, clear, “everybody is going to agree” and “it will always work” business.
Regulations can have negative effects, will have negative effects. It’s the price we pay for life in an ordered society, for the order that upholds the society and its economic life.
I may be for less of something at times and more of the same thing at other times. It’s a balance. During the 40 years I was President of the Tiffin Park and Recreation Board, we, “the government,” acted as your agents and used your money (our money in a sense, the wealth of the community) to pay private businesses to provide us with playground equipment and ballpark lights. We worked to maintain and improve our parks in a way that the majority of the people in the city said (by reelecting the mayor and council that appointed us) they wanted. And along with Council we made rules to make our parks serve what we believed were your (our) interests.
The landfill expansion should shake up our thinking. Our political truisms prove pretty useless. There is not necessarily a Republican or a Democrat solution to the problem. Just as there wasn’t a Republican or Democrat solution to where we chose to locate the City swimming pool when we built it. (Private contractor, tax money, the Board as your agent making purchases on your behalf for a “public good” we believed a majority wanted.) It’s called capitalism, whether it’s a single individual, a group of individuals, a private non-profit or the government that buys and uses privately produced good.
And we as a community certainly should have the right to limit (through government action) bad actors or regulate needed services.
Four legs good; two legs bad? Private action good; government action bad? Let’s learn something from this experience.
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