The uninterrupted stride of intervention

Paying the price for our inability to sit still

By James Fullmer
From the April 2007 Print Edition

            Up here in the Bay Area, high-speed chases seem to be rarer than in southern California. Whether it’s because of the one-way streets, the random concrete barriers in the middle of roads, or the fact that any getaway driver without the foresight of buying FasTrak is likely to get caught in the toll plaza of some bridge, people find other ways of getting away with committing a crime — electing Jerry Brown as mayor of Oakland, for example.

            Where I’m from, though, the high-speed chase is a veritable way of life. Any SoCal kid who ever watched afternoon cartoons was bound to one day see “Pinky and the Brain” preempted by some dude in a green Chevy heading west on the 105. (Anyone else remember that one? It traumatized me for years, and taught me to always lock my doors.)

            Now, there was always a pair of commentators doing the play-by-play, informing us of the suspect’s speed, direction, and whether or not the spike strip was being deployed. And invariably, at least once and usually multiple times during the chase, one of them would shake their head and say something along the lines of “There’s no way he can get away. The police always win. We just hope, if the suspect is listening, that he’ll give up running before someone gets hurt.”

            It seems so logical, doesn’t it? If the person runs, he’ll be punished for evading arrest and for the original crime that prompted him to run in the first place. If you want to get all statistical about it, the infinitesimally small chance of getting away probably does not balance out the extra punishment in terms of expected value. Hence the righteous incredulity toward the suspect’s actions on the announcers’ parts, and on ours. 

            Yet it’s a lot easier to say this when one is not fleeing arrest. We’re not really all that different from the suspect, and we see this in our daily lives. Anyone who has ever worked a job where you have to stay standing for hours at a time knows this — your feet hurt like heck and you know that walking around is only going to make them more sore in the end. At the same time, though, you feel like you’ve got to do something. The action of walking around, even though it makes you worse off in the end, at least makes you feel you’re doing something.

I could go on and on with examples of this aspect of human nature. Whether we’re speeding away from the scene of a crime or simply trying to make a living working at a store, it’s something that we all exhibit. Guys are especially guilty of this: There’s a certain look girls are wont to give us as we do something stupid and then try to justify ourselves with even stupider excuses. Roughly speaking, the look translates to “stop digging, you idiot.”

            Even our elected officials aren’t immune to this little idiosyncrasy. See, we live in a broken world. There’s so much wrong in the world — poverty, crime, and hatred are all things that still exist. There is a lot we can and should do as individuals to fight them.          

            Now, I don’t mean to say there’s no role for government in anything. Government action abolished slavery, destroyed fascism, ended segregation, and it continues to do good things. I’m secure enough in my conservatism to admit that. There is, however, a limit to what it can do. 

Are there people in America today, hard-working people, who through no fault of their own are living in poverty? You bet, and that’s tragic. But Congress sees this, and decides that it must do something, and all of a sudden the federal minimum wage has been hiked. Then, small businesses have to lay off people to cover the new costs. Instead of the working poor, we’ve now got the unemployed poor. But at least we’re doing something, right?

“Try something” — this was exactly the attitude that we were taught to admire Franklin D. Roosevelt for. FDR did some good things, and he certainly was the type of inspiring leader Americans wanted during the Depression and the War, but there’s a great deal of evidence to show that on the whole his programs extended, rather than shortened, the Depression.

It’s easy and satisfying to pass more laws or spend more money in order to fix a problem. We feel like we’re doing something, and on top of that we’re spared the actual effort of making sure we’re actually getting anything done. This is a recipe for disaster, and it’s exactly why the Framers’ vision of a small, limited government makes sense. It prevents us from taking the easy way out.

But that doesn’t really matter to the generation of politicians raised after the New Deal. Government is not able to solve all of our problems, and it may in fact make them worse. If the alternative is to sit back and refrain from doing any more damage, count on our leaders to be on the side of human nature instead.

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