The Political Value of Crisis

There’s one pattern in which you generate political support by creating a “crisis”. Now, since all human situations have some negative features to them, nothing is easier than to find something to complain about and to call it “a crisis”.

A crisis does not mean that what you’re talking about is any worse than anything else that human beings do. It does not even mean that it’s getting worse than it was in the past. In a remarkable number of cases as I’ve looked at, the thing that is called a crisis has, in fact, been getting better for the years prior to the policy.

Now, after you’ve convinced people there’s a crisis, you have your solution. This is sort of a four-stage thing. First comes the crisis, then comes a solution. Typically, the people who advocate the solution will say, “this will lead to ‘Beneficial Results A’.” The critics say, “this will lead to ‘Detrimental Result Z’.” In the third stage, they put the policy in and the result is that at least a ‘Detrimental Results Z’.

The interesting part is the fourth step, where the people who attribute this detrimental result of the policy are accused of being simplistic for ignoring the complexities of the many factors involved. Moreover, the only cure for this new bad situation is more of the same policy.

Let me give a couple of examples.

First, the War on Poverty. Now, the purpose of the War on Poverty was not to prove that if you took money from here and then you put it there, it would be more money there than there was before. The purpose of the War on Poverty was to end dependency on government handouts. That is you would have “an increase in spending and investment,” as they say, “in these programs which will then pay off down the road as all the problems that have been forestalled by this wonderful program now begin to subside.” You can quote either from Lyndon Johnson or Bill Clinton, depending on who you prefer to quote – large literature from both sources. And so, ‘retraining’ is one of the great magic words in both administrations. You will ‘retrain’ people, including people who had never trained in the first place, in order to reduce long-term dependency. So, the predictions were made that if you had these programs after some period of years dependency on the government would decline, and of course the opposite prediction that dependence on the government would increase. And so, the War on Poverty was initiated.

First of all, the situation at the beginning of the crisis. Poverty had been declining in the United States for at least a decade. Dependency on the government to stay out of poverty had been declining for at least a decade prior to the War on Poverty. Dependency on government began to increase almost immediately. As of today, there are more people in poverty than there were in 1964 despite literally trillions of dollars spent. And the only cure is more of the same.

Example two: sex education. Now, the goal of sex education was to prevent teenage pregnancy and venereal disease. This, of course, was a “crisis”. Now for those of us who tend towards skepticism, if we look back at the actual data we find that teenage pregnancy was declining for more than a decade prior to the introduction of sex education into the public school system. By 1968, half of all the public schools in the United States had sex education. During the 1970′s, the other half kicked in. Teenage pregnancy during the decade of the 1970′s rose by approximately 50%. Teenage gonorrhea tripled between 1956 and 1978. And both those trends are still continuing.