Dismembered

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Dismembered: How the Conservative Attack on the State Harms Us All is a recent book which is worth a read, particularly as the machinery of government continues to be dismantled and public goods destroyed, in the United States and elsewhere. Authors Polly Toynbee* and David Walker talk about public goods as “those things we all buy together” and chronicle how we’re losing them.

This book is about the United Kingdom, but the process they describe is also happening in the U.S. and in many other market-centric democracies.

Written with wit, and sometimes biting humor, it is an immensely engaging page-turner.

Toynbee and Walker charge that government has been “dismembered, fragmented and degraded as deliberate policy.” And while there are intermittent mentions in the press about the destruction of public goods, “what is less reported is how the thinning of public services weakens bonds of community as the emblems of orderliness disappear – the vanishing park keepers, estate caretakers, stations masters, guards, crown post office counters…”

You can also find a condensed version of their story in an article published by The Guardian, May 9, 2017: “Disparage, Downgrade, Downsize.”

Here are a few excerpts from the book:

In response to a politician who disparages the state and claims to get nothing from it, Toynbee and Walker write:

“[H]ere is someone who apparently has lived for 50 years…and clearly has never breathed clean air, used a regulated market, eaten trustworthy food in a restaurant, spent state-guaranteed money or, as on online wit observed, used a public toilet.”

“The state’s trumpet goes unblown.”

“People don’t necessarily know – or care to find out – what connects broadcasting, paving and potholes, security online, connectivity between cities and countries and so on. But even taking these services for granted denotes a belief in the order of things; it is an aspect of feeling secure.”

How can people be so oblivious? In part it’s because of the conventional wisdom and ‘common sense’ that permeate our societies today.

In describing the private taking of public goods, the authors recount how defenders of privatization claim,

“It’s practical, there’s no ideology driving it ... But underneath these pragmatic propositions are … dogmatists who insist that government is inherently incapable and costly…”

“how we think about the public realm and what we practice in central and local government is freighted by abstractions such as markets and competition, all the more insidious because they go unrecognized or pass as ‘common sense.’”

“This is wrong. Competitive free markets are figments of the imagination of ideologues…”

In future Public Goods Posts we will talk about a rising new “public economics” movement that could challenge, overturn and reconstruct standard, ‘common sense,’ but dangerously wrong economics teachings.

* Yes, Toynbee is the granddaughter of the historian.

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The Public Goods Post has been created by June Sekera,
Founder and Director of the Public Goods Institute; and Research Fellow at the Global Development And Environment Institute, Tufts University.

The Public Goods Post is produced by Daniel Agostino.

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