As an aside, I cannot help but note that this kind of program would never get approval if it were proposed to mitigate crime in the slums of a US city.
Surely you must be kidding me? In the US we do this stuff all the time.
Well, not the Surge, but community-building. The difference is, it is done primarily on the local level, recently quite successfully in cities like New York which were supposed to be the intractable, textbook examples of the failure of capitalism.
Unlike the socialists, we haven't lost site of the fact that government doesn't create jobs, it just re-allocates them, usually badly and with "unexpected" side-effects. That is why we try to keep the efforts local, and try to keep in mind that the only long-term solution involves jobs that are real, i.e. self-sustaining without subsidy. Unfortunately, we too often forget, (arrg! Ethanol! How I hate thee!) and disaster ensues.
One of the enduring misunderstandings that Europeans have about the USA is, they assume that if the national government isn't doing something, then nothing real or substantial is being done. And in most European countries, that would be a fair assumption.
Worse, the European press, reflecting and reinforcing the group-think of the European governing elites, goes to ridiculous extremes to perpetuate this stereotype.
But in the US it is the opposite: All the real work goes on in the private sector, both for-profit and non-profit, and at the state and local level. Our federal anti-poverty, etc. programs are some of the least effective American institutions that exist.
Indeed, part of the reason the so-called "Surge" strategy has been so popular with the troops is, community building comes naturally to them.
They are citizen-soldiers.
Will it work? I dunno. But Iraqis are certainly beginning to take notice. Europe should too. __ I am the most conservative Unitarian-Universalist you will ever meet.
One of the enduring misunderstandings that Europeans have about the USA is, they assume that if the national government isn't doing something, then nothing real or substantial is being done.
It's not a misunderstanding, because it mostly isn't.
It's nice that the US is a veritable capitalist utopia of convivial communality, but if all anyone can see is the shanty-town poor when you visit the rougher areas, it's hard to be convinced that there's a plan at all, never mind that the plan is working.
If you don't have a government ethic of communality - which the US doesn't, particularly - then it's no surprise that federal programs don't currently work.
That doesn't mean they can't in principle, it means you no longer have the culture to do them properly, which isn't quite the same thing.
So if you're going to tell me that the glories of free enterprise have stepped in to fill the gap across the US, I'm going to have to ask what evidence there is that this has made any real difference.
If the private sector is so all-powerful, it should surely have solved the problem by now. It's not as if there's been a lot of hostility to private efforts from Washington for the last decade or so.
And yet - the trend has been for lower wages, longer hours, poorer infrastructure, and more unemployment. What's wrong with this picture?
As for job creation - are you saying the New Deal didn't actually work at all? The freeways, the dams, the infrastructure were just pointless make-work?
Unlike the socialists, we haven't lost site of the fact that government doesn't create jobs, it just re-allocates them,
This is simply false. If you have involuntary unemployment, the state can indeed create jobs out of thin air.
They may not be meaningful (then again, they may be - railroad construction and operation, for instance, is something The Market(TM) does badly if at all). But even if they aren't meaningful - even if it is just a matter of digging holes in the ground - it will still stimulate demand for other, worthwhile production.
If the government finances this through direct taxation of wealth (and/or the high incomes that usually correlate with wealth), or runs a temporary deficit, the net result is a transfer of demand to the present - where it can pull an economy out of a recession - from the future - where it, if the economy has been managed properly - will be recouped during a boom. Or from such excess demand harvested during a past boom.
All the real work goes on in the private sector, both for-profit and non-profit, and at the state and local level. [My emphasis]
If you need charity, then the government isn't doing its job.
Snark aside, you're not even right about the government not doing constructive work. Right off the bat, I can think of only two parts of US infrastructure that works as well as or better than the German equivalent: The National Park Service and the Interstate Highways. Both are Federal operations.
- Jake If you only spend 20 minutes of the rest of your life on economics, go spend them here.
