GOVERNMENTS MAKE THE BIGGEST MISTAKES

GOVERNMENTS MAKE THE BIGGEST MISTAKES THOMAS SOWELL Implicit in the wide range of efforts on the left to get government to take over more of our decisions for us is the assumption that there is some superior class of people who are either wiser or nobler than the rest of us. Yes, we all make mistakes. But do governments not make bigger and more catastrophic mistakes? Even in the United States, government policies in the 1930s led to crops being plowed under, thousands of little pigs being slaughtered and buried, and milk being poured down sewers, at a time when many Americans were suffering from hunger and diseases caused by malnutrition. The Great Depression of the 1930s, in which millions of people were plunged into poverty in even the most prosperous nations, was needlessly prolonged by government policies now recognized in retrospect as foolish and irresponsible. One of the key differences between mistakes that we make in our own lives and mistakes made by governments is that bad consequences force us to correct our own mistakes. But government officials cannot admit to making a mistake without jeopardizing their whole careers. Can you imagine a President of the United States saying to the mothers of America, “I am sorry your sons were killed in a war I never should have gotten us into”?