The Government You Deserve?

Texas is interesting. It's rich, huge, expansive. But it's also tacky, cheap, tawdry. The roads are broad, the houses large, the portions vast. But the roads don't have sidewalks, shoulders or gutters and flood easily. The houses are built from chipboard and cardboard. The meals are large and varied but bland and derivative.

Texas is a society built on tiny units, separated and divided. The family home is a giant building distanced from the road by a large lawn, without a sidewalk for neighbors to pass by, with all the roads destinations rather than places to pass by. The back yard will be large, fenced, and equipped with pools, bars, patios, tables, chairs, hot tubs, cabanas, hammocks. The house will have fireplaces, dens, his and hers whatevers, fans, air conditioning, giant tv's, high ceilings, spiral staircases. The owners will leave this lavish shelter in huge shiny carriages, windows sealed and tinted agains intrusion, air cooled and conditioned, sounds perfectly controlled The journeys will be to designated places for designated purposes, there is not meandering, wandering, hanging out. It is pod living, almost like living in Star Trek. The house is the ship which supples almost everything but is surrounded by the harsh vacuum of space. An SUV exiting and entering the powered door of a garage looks like nothing more than the shuttle leaving the bay.


A culture that is based on the individual, living in pods, only leaving to accomplish specific goals produces individuals who are motivated by getting and kepping their own things. Such a culture is based on the individual filling their own needs, rather than a community filling the needs of the individuals in the community. As such there are no town squares, no promenades, no town centers, no village greens, many more golf courses than parks. While there are roads to get places these are designed simply as surfaces to drive along, no bike lanes, no sidewalks, no boulevardes. Such a culture tries to keep its money and therefore avoids taxes. Lower taxes mean fewer services, cheaper services, poorer services. Crappy services for your tax dollars produces a belief that government services are automatically poor, and in Texas that's a self-fulfilling prophecy.

In Texas the streets flood regularly. The power goes out in a strong rainfall. The crime rate is very high and I rarely see a policeman and never outside of a car. Our mail delivery has been sporadic, to the point where we found out that upon going to the post office to tell them that we weren't getting all our mail they recorded us as having moved ot. It is only that their incompetence was so high that we still received any mail at all. To get your driving license you line up for several hours and then wait eight weeks to possibly get it mailed to you, there is no telephone number for enquiries. Education levels are low, health is poor/ The government services in Texas are terrible and Texans think that governments are literally incapable of doing anything well. The result is a feedback loop, self-interest above community interest leads to fewer resources for community resources, which leads to poorer services, which leads to a lower regard for community services, which leads to a greater regard for self-interest.

In places where people think, expect and demand that governments can achieve things, the resulting government services overwhelmingly are of high quality. In Texas, where people think and expect that governments are incompetent, crooked, evil entities the government they receive is woeful. As my darling wife says, Texas is like living in the richest third world country in the world.