Let's Use Afghanistan as an Entitlement Testbed

The present leaders of our country seem to want to turn us into an entitlement society. They feel that everyone is entitled to food, shelter, clothing, medical care, education, etc. They don't see any connection between the availability of these goods and services and the amount of individual effort expended in producing or acquiring them. It's almost as if they think all these things will magically appear.

I know that the problem with an entitlement society is that it lessens the incentive to produce. This is true for individuals and for companies. Individuals will work less when all their basic needs are guaranteed. Companies will fail when profit is outlawed and price controls are imposed. The government will have to take over production of all goods and services and force people to work. Black markets will develop. Utopia? I don't think so.

Some people think an entitlement society, or socialism, is a good thing and others think it is a bad thing. So how do we determine who is right? We need a test case. And I propose that we use Afghanistan for that test case. We are already in the process of nation building over there so it would be relatively easy to turn it into a testbed for an entitlement society. And we can't do much harm to the Afghans if the experiment doesn't work because they're already living in poverty.

I'm not proposing that we give them goods or money -- just limited services. That is, we would just send them a bunch of progressives to establish their government and run it as a closed system; no further free help from the outside. If outside goods and services are needed they will have to be purchased with inside goods and services. This entitlement society experiment will have to succeed or fail on its own.

This new government would likely decree right away that:

• Every village have a modern, full-service hospital that will provide free medical-care
• Every village have modern schools for both boys and girls
• Every city have a top-notch tuition-free university
• Transportation and communications systems be modernized
• Every home have access to electrical power
• Every family have a nice modern home
• Everyone have sufficient food and clothing

Then we could watch it unfold (it would be required that the world news media be allowed to observe and report). Right away the government would begin to realize that the hard part is the implementation. Something can't be supplied that isn't produced. If nobody works nothing will be produced. So how can they convince the people to work hard to build or produce all this when they have just been told that they are entitled to it, and when they probably aren't convinced they need or want it? The options are persuasion or force.

The government could persuade by offering workers titles and privileges that set them apart from the non-workers, but this conflicts with the progressives' belief that everyone should be equal. The government could persuade by giving the workers money in proportion to the amount of work they do, but that smacks of capitalism which progressives dislike. Some workers might be persuaded based on what they see as the merits of this new entitlement society, but probably not enough. That leaves force.

In order to make this work the government will eventually have to assign duties to everyone and take steps to ensure that the duties are performed. When it does it has, in essence, put in place a system that requires people to work for what they get. But not a very good one. When people are forced to work they aren't going to produce as much as those working voluntarily for money.

As I said above, I know that such an experiment will fail. But I also know that the progressives would still refuse to admit that it was due to bad policy. They would likely claim that the Afghans would be far worse off without their leadership.

Being entitled to something that doesn't exist is meaningless. If something is to exist someone has to produce it. If something is produced someone has to work. If work is done someone has to be forced or compensated. What do you prefer? Slave labor or capitalism?

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