​How Wise Are Our Political Leaders?

View of the U.S. Capitol in Washington on Aug. 1, 2022. (Stefani Reynolds/AFP via Getty Images)

Commentary

We are less than two weeks from the midterm elections. Many Americans have high hopes that we will elect people who will lead us to a brighter future. My hopes are more modest. I just hope they don’t mess things up too much.

Am I being too pessimistic? I guess it all depends on what your particular expectations for Congress are. Our country faces complex issues and formidable challenges. What special qualifications will the 535 people we elect to the House and Senate have to solve those problems?

The members of the next Congress are bound to have a similar profile to that of the current Congress. Our elected representatives present a cross-section of American society. Members may be doctors, lawyers, military veterans, businesspersons, educators, etc. They may also include political opportunists who never made a mark in the private sector before discovering that they could make a lucrative living out of telling other people how unfair our country is and how they would be their Santa Claus.

Let’s assume for the sake of argument that, collectively speaking, Congress includes many highly accomplished individuals and that (on average at least) they are more intelligent than a random sample of 535 Americans. But does that give them the ability to make wise decisions? The present Congress appropriated several hundred billion dollars to subsidize computer chip manufacturing. What qualifies those members of Congress to decide which industries should be subsidized and by how much? The doctors and lawyers in Congress may be smart individuals, but what special knowledge do they have about computers (or about green energy—another chosen recipient of congressional largess this year)?

Let’s take a look at government’s track record and see if that bolsters our confidence in the superior wisdom of members of Congress. I wrote not long ago of the danger of forgetting truths that we have long known. Now, progressives and some of you reading this may not agree with my contention in that article that we need to remember the superiority of free markets, so let me lower the bar here. Can we all agree that humans need food, water, and energy? So let us survey how competently government has dealt with those basic necessities of life.

Food

Multiple threats to the global food supply have become apparent this year—everything from the war in Ukraine to governments in countries such as Sri Lanka, Canada, and The Netherlands (the second leading exporter of agricultural goods in the world after the USA) throttling back food production in pursuit of the anti-human ESG agenda to an ominous confluence of droughts and poor crop yields.

Here in the United States, we see similar actions. Several months into his presidency Joe Biden announced plans to pay farmers to leave another 4 million acres fallow. This year Biden called for more farmland to be used to grow corn for ethanol rather than corn that humans can eat in a step toward more complete government control over food production.

A famous statement (of unknown origin) bears remembering here: “If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in five years there would be a shortage of sand.” Obviously, that is colorful hyperbole, but the history of food shortages in societies where government has assumed control over food production should never be forgotten. And let us not forget about the months-long shortage of baby formula—a market distortion brought to you courtesy of your friendly federal Food and Drug Administration.

Water

The only natural resource that rivals food in importance to human life is water, both for human consumption and for agricultural production. Does government manage water well? Not really, when you consider the environmentalist zealotry that results in California channeling water into the Pacific Ocean to preserve a fish called the delta smelt—water that is desperately needed by drought-stricken California food-growers. (There we go again: less food at a time of increasing need for food.)

The federal government’s U.S. Geological Survey has been warning for years about the depletion of water tables under midwestern farmlands, and yet Biden’s stated desire to ramp up the production of corn for ethanol exacerbates the threat.

Governments in cities such as Flint, Michigan, and Jackson, Mississippi, haven’t been able to provide safe drinking water to their populations. Yes, those are municipal governments instead of the federal government, but the point is: If governments can’t demonstrate competency in something as elementary and essential as supplying drinking water, can we really trust them to solve larger problems?

Energy

The typical American citizen knows that having reliable, affordable supplies of energy is crucial to human life. Energy is the great multiplier of human strength that has powered the unprecedented economic growth of the last two or three centuries. Yet against this backdrop we have the stunning spectacle of Biden and his party striving mightily to deny us access to fossil fuels, leaving American consumers scrambling to cope with higher utility bills and gasoline prices.

You undoubtedly can rattle off several examples of how our government’s anti-energy policies are adversely affecting you. I’ll just cite one specific example that illustrates how foolhardy it is for us to trust government to devise an intelligent energy policy: Shortly after California Gov. Gavin Newsom announced that only electric vehicles would be permitted to be sold in his state several years hence, there was an official request that owners of EVs refrain from charging their expensive vehicles to avert blackouts. This seems to be leading to a future in which the government decides when and how much you will be permitted to drive.

Politicians’ Skill Set

If government can’t manage food, water, and energy policies wisely, what makes so many voters believe that politicians can intelligently manage, fix, plan, or control our economy benignly? Whatever skills they may have demonstrated in the private sector, neither the new nor the old members of Congress will be equipped with the wisdom to solve major problems, devise economically rational economic plans, or even to simply take care of us. (Of course, our founders never expected Uncle Sam to take care of us. The federal government was supposed to keep us free and let private citizens direct private property to the meeting of human needs. But that’s another story.)

Did you ever ponder how members of Congress decide how much money goes to which special interests? It’s not a matter of wisdom or enlightened reason, but of responding to political pressures and incentives. Lobbyists bend their ears, contribute to their campaign treasuries, and persuade them that federal dollars would be better spent supporting the lobbyists’ causes than the causes of other potential cronies (er, I mean recipients) of federal aid. That is how Washington operates today.

By all means, vote. Some candidates are clearly better (or in some cases, less bad) than others. But the best we can hope for from the new Congress is that it not be quite as profligate in dispensing taxpayer dollars to special interests as the present Congress has been.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.