This article explores the little-known reality that a huge majority of human progress was under-written by the very entity that conservatives loathe, Big Government.
So let’s go back to the Big Gummint notion that Republicans have raised. Way back, conservatives ginned up yet another jihad against Joe Biden, this time because Biden stressed the fact that great ideas can’t get off the ground without government vision and government incentive. The right wing, as is customary, went bananas.
And of course Biden is abundantly right, and the wingnuts absurdly wrong.
Let’s begin with the bedrock fact that for 5000 years of recorded history, almost no great achievements happened unless a government was involved in some way, simply because governments – empires, monarchies etc – were the only institutions capable of achieving anything on a grand scale, for most of those five millenia. Whenever people oohed and aahed over some achievement of the ancient world there was always a royal or imperial sponsor writing the checks: Pyramids, the Great Wall, Roman aqueducts, the Roman road system that held Europe together and was built partly by government soldiers, the plays of Euripedes.
Without government, capitalism wouldn’t be possible. The capitalist model was born, grew and thrived because kings and princes nurtured it. Banking began in the government granaries of ancient Egypt, and flourished in the Middle Ages under the auspices of the Medici rulers of Florence, the London Royal Exchange which as the name implies answered to the Crown, and the state-backed Bank of Amsterdam which underwrote much of global capitalism before the Industrial Revolution.
As with banking, so with trade: the Doge of Venice and the House or Orange launched their commercial vessels, as did the House of Hapsburg and eventually Peter the Great. The conquest of the New World was all about kings subsidizing capitalists to go find/borrow/steal resources in the Western Hemisphere, starting with Queen Isabella hocking her pearls to send Columbus off across the Atlantic. George III and Queen Victoria built a capitalist empire so that the East India Company could conquer India and the tai-pan businessmen and opium dealers could conquer China for King and Country. The cotton boom in the south would have been impossible without southern politicians protecting it in Congress. In almost every case, it was the guns of government which protected transportation lanes so the businessmen could make money.
Even in the last century or so when large-scale private enterprise became practical, government was still propping the whole thing up. In the late 19th century the drivers were the railroads and to a lesser extent the telegraph: railroads spread across the country due to a wide range of charters by state governments, and by federal action such as the Pacific Railway Acts which set up land grants, gave away more than 100 million acres to the railroads, and provided subsidies. The telegraph, same thing: it all began with a grant from Congress, and then the Pacific Telegraph Act.
And on into the 20th century. Radio and television are heavily subsidized by governments in most of the world, including America where PBS is actually the largest network; government protected television stations from being swallowed up by the networks. Without federal involvement, how many satellites would we have in the sky, running our entire telecommunications infrastructure? Without government approving the Kingsbury Agreement, AT&T could not have revolutionized the telephone industry; government also nudged things along by fostering the notion that phone service should reach every community in the country, and by issuing an FCC ruling fostering the introduction of answering machines, fax machines, and modems. And giggle all you want about Al Gore, but the internet was also a government idea.
The automakers boomed when the federal government gave them wartime contracts and later bailed them out, and when Eisenhower built the interstate, thus launching half a century of car culture: without government road projects, how many highways would we have, or suburbs, or malls selling all those capitalist goods, or drive-in banks, drive-in fast food? How many of the nodes in our capitalist market system do not have a nice big parking lot in front of them? And the oil that makes the cars go gets to America in large part because of the network of oil companies set up in the 1950s by the State Department to import Middle Eastern oil.
Capitalist achievement is regularly, daily, underwritten with government incentives, incredibly loose regulation, and tax breaks, particularly in the finance and insurance industries. And when government protection does not keep the markets safe, chaos ensues, as we learned in the 1870s, in the 1929 crash, the S&L scandals, and all the nonsense stemming from Bush’s orgy of deregulation.
Know what else you rightwingers wouldn’t have without government? Religion. The three monotheistic faiths would have collapsed without Big Gummint: the caliphs and their warriors built the Muslim empires, the Jewish kings built the temple and subsidized Judaism, and Christianity was an absurd little cult until the Roman Emperors and then the medieval monarchs embraced it. When governments like the Tudors rejected religion, religion suffered; when religion and government joined hands again, religion boomed, whether the partnership was being crafted by the Taliban, the Iranian ayatollahs, or goons like Jerry Falwell.
So while you wingnuts are screeching that all government is evil, take a moment to show some respect for all those underpaid big-gummint soldiers, policemen, sailors, firemen, airmen, teachers, marines, Secret Service, and mailmen who can carry your documents 3000 miles across country, reliably, for half a buck. You're welcome! The next time we hear rightwing weasels screaming about Big Bad Gummint one day, and whining for stimulus money and hurricane aid the next day, we'll stifle the impulse to tell you to go fornicate with yourselves. Because, unlike you, we're grownups who put national needs ahead of personal gripes and neuroses.
Incidentally, the last twenty years have proved that every time we try to privatize government services – education, health care, military operations – its costs us money, because of waste, fraud and abuse. Private firms are there for their own profit, not the taxpayer’s interests.
