My problem with Praxian preaching

Two years ago I took part in a League of Women Voters panel discussion in Fairbanks with Larry Persily and Tammie Wilson on the state financial situation.

I thought it went well, although certain members of the audience, especially Mike Prax and Lance Roberts, didn’t care to hear me advocate for a reduction in Permanent Fund dividends, new taxes and the continuation of state services, including the University of Alaska.

After the presentation at the Noel Wien Library, Prax jabbed his index finger in the air at me and began screaming. He called me a “God-damned thief,” among other things. This was out of character for Prax, normally a mild-mannered individual.

When I said that stating an opinion about public policy is not theft, he did not want to hear it. He said if I wanted more money to go to the university, it should come out of my pocket and that I should not force him to pay for it through government theft.

I’ve lost my temper far too many times to criticize anyone for a heated remark.

I only mention this now to criticize the Prax master plan for government, which, if I understand it, is that people should only pay for government services they want and all else is theft.

All Alaskans should be free to pick and choose, while collecting billions more in dividends. Appropriate government services, then, are in the eye of the beholder.

He outlined this unworkable concept three months before Gov. Mike Dunleavy appointed Prax to the Legislature to replace Wilson, who quit her position in the Legislature to take a state job for $86,400 a year in the health department.

Prax continues to preach from within the same small box of ideas he constructed for himself before he began collecting his state paycheck.

On Tuesday, he and other legislators appeared before a meeting of the Fairbanks Economic Development Corp. to talk about the latest special session and the next special session.

“The state government isn’t really in the business of governing anymore. It’s in the business of providing,” Prax said.

“And forced providing, that’s the underlying debate, is people are forced to pay for one thing they might want, also three or four things that they may not want. And we have to, if we are a business, a business always has to look at reducing the cost of doing business.”

Prax said there are “plenty of options” on how to reduce spending, but he didn’t name any specific services that he wants to cut.

That’s the problem. He can’t identify how to save $700 million or $1 billion. The only way to cut those amounts is to diminish public education and force tens of thousands of poor Alaskans to go without health care. He doesn’t know enough about the details of state spending on these big items.

During the last session, Prax voted to spend $4.5 billion on current and back dividends, but a majority of House members had the sense to reject that unsustainable and reckless idea.

In June, Prax lectured fellow legislators that if the government was intended to provide things to people, it would be known as “providerment.” He claimed all government can do is force and that is “inherently unjust.”

Prax claims that in the legislative budget process, “we just assume all spending is OK and just how much more do we want to spend. But we don’t really hold the administration accountable to standards that we have agreed on the year before and goals that we’ve agreed on the year before. And if a business was run like that, any business, they would soon be out of business.”

Competent legislators do not assume “all spending is OK.” Those who study the budget know where the money goes and how it is spent. Prax should start doing that and come up with a list of programs to eliminate if he wants to be taken seriously.

After Prax said state government is like a business, Rep. Adam Wool said that state government is not like a business because it does not exist to earn a profit—it exists to provide services that people want.

People want the government to respond to wildfires, earthquakes, pandemics and provide education, roads, prisons and other services.

“I think people want services. If you think that’s not the role of government, that’s your opinion, that’s fine,” Wool said.

Wool mentioned the overwhelming community response to the proposed Dunleavy budget cuts in the short-lived Donna Arduin era as evidence of what people want from the state.

Prax continued to claim that people should be free to select and pay for services they want.

“The flaw is that the disagreement on what should be the priority,” Prax said. “And we should, in my opinion, reduce the propensity to force people to agree with prisons, or university or whatever.”

Whatever.

The current system comes down to the state saying, “I want you to force somebody else to pay for this or that.”

Prax said that people who want to pay for services and receive the Permanent Fund dividend are “free to go ahead and send their check back, if they want to do that, and then we can quit arguing about it.”

That’s no solution. We have a Legislature, which consists of 60 people, whose job it is to set priorities for state spending, what Prax calls “forced providing.”

Prax should provide a detailed list of government services he wants to stop providing and those he regards as theft. That’s the only way to have an open, honest discussion.

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