I like the essay by Annie Lowrey of the Atlantic [@lesson], as it said the things I wanted to say for a long time: Americans should use the resources possessed by government to get much of the social work done, not relying solely on the nonprofits and NGOs. First, “individuals, nonprofits and companies simply don’t have the resources to provide public services at scale.” Secondly, the private sector suffers from a cyclical fluctuation over time. During economic downtime the amount of citizen donations almost always goes down. The public sector, especially the federal government, is largely immune to cycles due to its counter-cyclical fiscal policy to increase spending and raise taxes during a recession. Thirdly, asking private citizens and families to bootstrap deepens the inequality because lower income individuals and families are less capable of helping themselves. Like Lowrey suggested, we should do what other rich countries have been doing and let government do its jobs with scale, counter-cyclic resources, so it can reduce inequalities and allow the private sector to do things they do best.

Putting government in the back burner long enough — when it should have been front and central — Americans do not even recognize that their government is not doing its jobs it is paid for doing. This is a huge waste of resources. Think of it: Whether we use government or not, we still must pay taxes. This is like charging a Tesla 24 hours a day, 7 days a week but never driving it.

The Pandemic Lesson for the Government

Lowrey is right that the biggest advantage of government is its scale — more accurately legitimate scale. Some private firms can reach a huge scale, like Microsoft with its Windows Operating system, and Alphabet for internet search engine. However, these firms do need to worry about being hit by the anti-trust law and anti-monopoly investigations, a concern no government needs to have.

With large scale comes lower cost. But look at what the Trump administration has done: It gave up its scale and cost advantage that could have been leveraged to save lives. Instead, they decided early on to shift the responsibilities of testing, controlling social distancing and securing personal protection equipment to the states [@insider]. As Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff, had said, “Only in Washington, D.C., do they think that they have the answer for all of America.” Under this mentality, “Mr. Trump went, in a matter of days, from proclaiming that he alone had the authority to decide when the economy would reopen to pushing that responsibility onto the states.” [@insider]

But this is deadly wrong. Nobody has asked Washington, D.C. to provide an answer for everything, but the way Trump administration handled the crisis deserves a collective or class action lawsuit, because it failed its fundamental responsibilities. As @staterespons pointed out, governments must protect citizens from violence, provide goods and services that individual citizens cannot produce themselves and invest in education of citizens. From a financial /accounting perspective, federal government has no choice but to shoulder most responsibilities during crises, simply because federal income taxes are much higher than state taxes. Therefore, it is illegal for federal government to shift its own share of responsibility to anyone else. A class action lawsuit would teach the Trump administration a lesson in governmental accountability, the number one principle in governmental accounting.

This pandemic is also a textbook example where unified, uniform and cooperated actions are needed the most across the entire country. Scattered and isolated actions do not work because people move and they move the virus with them. Just when you thought you had the virus controlled, someone else not wearing mask may start another wave of cases.

Rule of Law on Fake News

America is among the best countries in terms of rule of law. But historically, Americans have worried more about putting the governments under control than anything or anyone else. This makes sense in the old days, when government was the only entity with more power than anyone else. But this is no longer true today. With modern information technologies, some individuals can do as much damage as a dictator, because online social media can quickly spread misinformation at the speed of light.

Anyone in doubt should watch the excellent documentary America’s Great Divide: From Obama to Trump, especially the part on the tragedy of Sandy Hook Elementary School, where 20 first-graders were gunned down together with 6 adults trying to protect the children. As the documentary shows, former President Obama cried for the first time in the Oval Office. He thought this a perfect time to push through a law in gun control. Former vice president Joe Biden was also optimistic, as the poll shows over 91% of the American people supported expanding background checks; even 80% of the households with an NRA member supported it.

Then it came Breibart, talk radios and Fox News, all promoting partisan arguments and conspiracy theories. The movie shows that one by one, Obama watched key republicans and even some democratic, back away from the bill.

Here is an idea that should work to put legal constraint not just on government but on individuals spreading misinformation and lies: Forget about labeling tweets that are potentially fake or offensive, like Twitter did. We should have a law that says anyone must reveal their sources of information if there are more than x number of viewers or audiences demanded clarification or verification. Anyone refusing to answer the demand would be subject to fines, jail time or at least a public apology. This works not through a single agency like Facebook or Twitter but through the crowd. The idea is to prevent anyone from lying or attaching others randomly without any legal consequences. Imagine next time another gun violence occurs and a talk show host claims that this is just fake news and nobody actually died from the shooting. By law this host would have to reveal his source(s) of information after say 1,000 or more audiences have heard his talk and demanded for verification. We can then expect a cleaner media environment because fake news will come at a price rather than no price.

References

Lowrey, Annie. 2020. “The Lesson Americans Never Learn.” https://www.theatlantic.com/
ideas/archive/2020/08/gofundme-economy-was-never-going-work/615457/.
Michael D. Shear, Eric Lipton, Noah Weiland, and David E. Sanger. 2020. “Inside
Trump’s Failure: The Rush to Abandon Leadership Role on the Virus.” https://www.
nytimes.com/2020/07/18/us/politics/trump-coronavirus-response-failure-leadership.html.
Slaughter, Anne Marie. 2017. “3 Responsibilities Every Government Has Towards
Its Citizens.” https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2017/02/government-responsibility-to-
citizens-anne-marie-slaughter/.