As a counter to calls for increased public funding for social programs, I frequently hear “Throwing government money at the problem never solved it, so why should we throw more?”. And as a recovering libertarian I have some sympathy for this argument, but in my role as family physician with intimate links to public health and preventative care I feel that it misses the point. Imagine a boat overflowing with water. How might one react if we were to bail with half our capacity, and declare failure “Bailing water from this boat hasn’t stopped the sinking, bailing doesn’t work”? (Maybe “Bailing Out” as a metaphor rubs the wrong way in the current environment, so I apologize for that, but I think the aphorism holds.)
Additionally, in the current interconnect world, there is no where to externalize the waste and fallout of local actions. It is a historically new phenomenon where we don’t have geographical boundaries to extend, or an oubliette into which we can throw our waste. Yet, we still operate on philosophical and economic theories founded on such assumptions. As the people on the right hand side of the boat demonstrate.