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And, it affects most people who would like to impose their schemes coercively on others (liberals and conservatives alike). They always imagine that the people in control are like them and will only use their power to further their good ends.
Actual experience contradicts this fantasy every day, but people keep it anyway because it's so damn comforting.
It's not quite the same thing but I'd like to reiterate my statement that "Part of being a libertarian is recognizing that public policy is not a fantasy story in which you may enact your whims, especially the more spiteful ones."
There's also a bit of crying wolf here. You scare quote "chaos" but I am sure you will grant that many families provide really terrible, damaging environments for children. Real chaos is not hard to identify. Is it your position that every department of social services is a net negative on the lives of the children they remove from abusive families? If not, why do you think other, less invasive interventions are doomed to failure, or a doorway to oppression?
Another problem with this article, perhaps even more fundamental, is not that all the proposals are bad (they're not) but they're all undefended. This isn't a real agument, it's an outline for a real argument.
Given the space constraints, I don't think Brooks could do better. But wouldn't it have been more useful if he could make one coherent argument for 800 words rather than string together what are little more than slogans?
If he's serious about ideas, Brooks should promote them in some depth in the Weekly Standard or something. That would be the honest and brave thing to do. Blurting out bullet points in his column is just glib sophistry.
"Is it your position that every department of social services is a net negative on the lives of the children they remove from abusive families? If not, why do you think other, less invasive interventions are doomed to failure, or a doorway to oppression?"
I have no idea what Wilkinson thinks, but framing it this way distorts the issue. If we were discussing the issue of whether or not police are excessively violent and aggressive, it would be missing the point to ask, "Are you saying police use of force is a net negative for society every time a policeman subdues someone who is about to commit murder?"
Of course social service departments are not a net negative if you only count the cases where they succeed- that's true of anything. The relevant question is not whether "every department of social services is a net negative on the lives of the children they remove from abusive families," but whether such departments are a net negative or positive in total, which includes the times when they screw up. Are such departments a net negative for children mistakenly removed from non-abusive homes, or children physically or sexually abused by foster parents, or parents who lose their children because of a mistake by the government's investigators? Most likely, yes. Does the harm caused by such incidents (and any other costs associated with these programs) outweigh the good done when the government gets it right and saves an abused child? I have no idea. Strengthening these agencies may be a good idea, but we won't know if we don't count costs as well as benefits.
How you can write a paragraph like your first above, two days after linking approvingly to this appalling ort of Brezhnevian agricultural propaganda, is quite beyond me. Physician, heal thyself!
Perhaps the trouble is that you have not applied your critical energies aggressively enough to the the problem of drawing the line between science and "science." Feynman may be of some assistance in this matter. How much of what you see as science, rather than "science," is the product of uncontrolled experiments or subjective judgments? And what happens to your worldview if you shove it back over the line?
Imagine a Brezhnevian world in which the State released a single number every year. Call it a Goodness Index. The point of the GI is just to tell you how well the State is doing its great, fatherly job. Who could doubt that this number - calculated, of course, by scientists, using only the most rigorous scientific procedures - would increase every year? Convince your subjects to believe that the Goodness Index really does represent honest-to-godness Goodness, and nine-tenths of your "infrastructure of technocratic control" is ready and waiting.
Try taking a closer look at even the economic statistics that you regularly see in headlines - GDP, CPI, and the like. Are these science, or "science"? What does an increase in GDP actually mean? I think you'll be surprised at the similarity between these figures and the GI.
The idea that "public policy" can be formulated objectively by scientists was the great delusion of the twentieth century. Remove it and you start to see what our system of government actually is. And it doesn't look good at all - at least, not to me.
I don't think we are much in agreement. I agree one shouldn't take a limit case (policeman shoots murderer in the act) as the model of state behavior. My phrasing here was really just raising a strawman to fight Will's strawman. Brooks isn't advocating a fascist state. He's advocating more support for kids in disastrous family situations. That may turn out net negative. Like you, I'm for looking at costs and benefits (and that was indeed what I meant by net negative -- social services on the whole being negative). The way Will wrote treated this issue, and Brooks generally, just felt like a dodge.
The fact that "positive government" is a term that was about equally likely to appear in a Paul Krugman or Frank Rich column should tell you just about all you need to know.
Yup.