This is where we get into the more nebulous area of defining public good as actively taking steps to prevent harm to the public, and provide for its collective needs.
There is no such thing as a free lunch. For example, if we as a society are going to place individuals into some sort of prison to prevent them from causing further harm to the public, we will have to pay for it.
This cannot be done on the cheap. We cannot simply place the guilty individuals into analogs of Andersonville, Auschwitz, or the Soviet gulag. Nor may we arbitrarily confine non-violent criminals with serial offenders, and other hardened criminals to be victimized and turned into hardened criminals themselves.
Once upon a time (according to an attorney friend of mine) the difference between a felony and a misdemeanor was you got executed for a felony, and incarcerated for a misdemeanor. But the difference between a barbarian and a civilized society is that a civilized society seeks justice for crimes, not retribution. This was the essence of Aeschylus' play The Eumenides twenty-five centuries ago, and it is still true today.
If you are going to seek justice, you are also going to need: a group empowered to investigate and arrest individuals who might be guilty of crimes; individuals to prosecute and defend those who are accused; individuals to see that a fair trial is conducted; individuals to report accuarately on the trial; a system overseeing the conduct of trials, in order to help prevent arbitrary or unjust verdicts from being handed down, as well as the means to correct wrongful verdicts. This means police, attorneys, judges and a court system that includes criminal and civil departments, plus various levels of appellate jurisdictions.
Why, you might ask, do we require such a complicated and thusly expensive system? Our recent experience with warlords and other "leaders" turning over innocent men (as purported members of al Qaeda or the Taliban) in Afghanistan and Iraq for reward money, as well as the work of the Innocence Project at Northwestern University (which demonstrated that many of the inmates on death row in Illinois and elsewhere around the country were innocent of the crime for which they had been sentenced to death), have shown that we can, in good conscience, settle for nothing less.
There are many other proactive acts, works, and institutions that are required for our complex modern society to function properly. Government controlled fire departments is one: anyone who doubts this should look at some of the big fires of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (including the Chicago fire in 1871), where private fire companies would only fight fires on policy holders' properties, and ignore fires on either side of that property. Roadway construction and maintenance is another example: privately owned roads work only for the rich and corporations, while the poor and small businesses have to take the long way around, as demonstrated by the railroads in the late nineteenth century.
Rereading John Stuart Mill's On Liberty, I am struck by how at odds much of modern libertarianism is with the ideals of its founder. Mill believed that while individual rights were usually paramount-except when preventing harm to another took precedence-he also said that individuals have a duty to their country (including helping with the common defense), and to their fellow human beings (including providing protection to the weak from oppression by the strong). I personally believe that Mill, noting the theories and actions of many modern libertarians, would almost certainly echo (in paraphrase) Karl Marx's comment, when confronted with the Communards of Paris in 1871: "If that is Communism, then I am not a Communist."
I would lay the blame at the feet of three different groups. First, is Ayn Rand and the followers of her Objectivist philosophy. The essence of her philosophy is that the superior individual matters, and that all else is unimportant. She out Nietzsche'd Nietzsche, something that I would have thought impossible. All of Zarathustra's angst, anger, elitism, cynicism, and arrogance, and none of his humanity, originality, or wit.
Second, is the Austrian School of Economics. From a return to the gold standard, to permitting bank panics to run their course, to their opposition to statistics and mathematical models for economic forecasting (they believe prices are the sole means that one should use to forecast economies, sort of like a thermometer as a physician's sole diagnostic tool); the libertarians who subscribe to this system would take us back to the years of every decade depressions, huge gaps between rich and poor, and the robber barons. The Austrian School (although not necessarily its followers) is very conservative, very elitist, and have no respect for any individual rights and liberties but their own.
Third are the two generations of Americans born between 1936 and 1976.
We are (yes I am one of them) unfortunately: greedy, selfish, narcissistic, hedonistic, short-sighted, cowardly, self-indulgent, self-absorbed, overworked, spineless, ignorant, and dozens of other adjectives, all of which indicate that given our opportunities, we really are a great disappointment. Frank Zappa may have summed it up perfectly when he said, "Greed's the key."
In the time of the greatest period of scientific and cultural change in human history, most of us refused to grasp the nettle and pull the prize to ourselves. We "turned on, tuned in, and dropped out." We did not know the difference between being overworked and hard work; taking one for the team and being exploited; giving up what we've earned and giving up what we've stolen. We, the children and grandchildren of America's "Greatest Generation," have settled for second best.
When I was in high school, America had one billionaire: J. Paul Getty. And one income could support a family, buy a home, and provide all of the amenities of the American dream.
Now that America has several dozen billionaires, even two incomes no longer guarantee obtaining the American dream. And our accrued debt, both public and private, may turn that dream into the Nightmare on Wall Street, with Goldman Sachs as Freddy Kruger.
We believed the lies of men like Ronald Reagan, Milton Friedman, Bill Kristol, William F. Buckley, Grover Norquist, and Rupert Murdoch, who said we could have our cake and eat it too. Services and government protections were cut, but military expenditures went through the roof. The taxes of the rich went down, the taxes of the working and middle class rose, and the difference was made up by a national debt that tripled under President Reagan, and has more than tripled again after George W. Bush's Presidency. Building private prisons has become one of the few steady "growth" industries over the last thirty years, as the number of prisoners has nearly quintupled. There is something obviously and seriously wrong when the "Land of the Free" has more people behind bars than the totalitarian People's Republic of China, which has five times our population.
