It is a tired cliché to say that the government should govern. But is it true? What does “governing” mean? Consider the following illustration: on Tuesday, when announcing his resignation, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo repeated the cliché. He said:
The best way I can help now is if I step aside and let government get back to governing.
We are again dumbstruck by Cuomo’s selfless devotion to the public good, which is, as we know, characteristic of all politicians’ altruism. But my question here is different: Is “governing” so obviously good?
The first chapter of Anthony de Jasay’s seminal book The State is titled “The Capitalist State” and presents a minimal state whose role is precisely not to govern, that is not to favor some individuals at the cost of harming others (which is, let us note in passing, exactly what cost-benefit analysis is meant to justify). Once we realize that the essence of most government activities consists in harming some individuals in order to favor others, the problem of political power becomes much clearer. The function of the Jaseyian minimal state is to protect liberty and property and to preempt any other state, foreign or domestic, intent on governing. In other words, the function of the minimal state is to preserve minimum anarchy against governing. De Jasay wrote:
If there is a state (which is not the same as claiming that there could be one) which is prepared to agree to these basic conditions [protect property and freedom of contract], it must be one which finds its satisfactions elsewhere than in governing. … The very rational of being a minimal state is to leave few levers for the zealots to get hold of and upset things with if, by the perversity of state or of the electorate, they manage to become the state.
There are objections to the liberal or perhaps conservative anarchism defended by de Jasay. A serious objection, exemplified by primitive stateless society, is that the conventional rules necessary to coordinate behavior in the absence of state laws may be much more oppressive and stifling than those laws and certainly those based on the rule of law. (This argument is invoked by Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson in their recent book The Narrow Corridor.)
Most objections, however, are less persuasive. One of them is that there exist “public goods” that all individuals want (public protection, military defense, etc.) but which private enterprise will not produce, at least in “optimal” quantities. In that area, government serves everybody. Perhaps. The counter-objection is that public goods are not very numerous (the “etc.” in the preceding parenthesis is not easy to document) and that many of them can conceivably be produced privately. Moreover, look at what governments do in practice.
Another objection is that it is as much a value judgment to prefer the moving status quo under the spontaneous order of individual liberty to government meddling in it. This is true, but the objection seems to grant the same moral status to non-liberty as to liberty.
It is also objected that the net effect of governing is not that bad because if it often turns against any given individual, it also often turns in his favor; this “churning” compensates. Every individual is alternatively on one side and the other of the favor-harm divide. James Buchanan tried to explain how a classical-liberal constitution can achieve this feat of preventing some individuals from being stuck in an exploited minority. Perhaps this ideal is worth pursuing, but this is not the way the world is generally going. Leviathan usually wins.
Moreover, except in the special case of public goods, the dream of a governing authority that does not, in a net sense, harm any individual is suspect: if each individual is equally favored and harmed by government interventions, the net effect is zero, not counting the waste and deadweight losses incurred in the process. Then, what is this egalitarian governing useful for? It is true that the qualification of public goods has its importance, but a look at the world shows that their production only represents a small fraction of government activities.
Can governing be anything else than exploitative? Is governing a benediction or a curse for the governed?
READER COMMENTS
Warren Platts
Aug 12 2021 at 3:15pm
It seems to me the main problem is not governance per se, but that 95% of the time in world history “the people” suffer under bad governance. Hence the utopian, Libertarian yearning for “a minimal state whose role is precisely not to govern, that is not to favor some individuals at the cost of harming others.”
But this shouldn’t fool anybody. Granted, who in their right mind would be against de Jassey’s idea that “the very rationale of being a minimal state is to leave few levers for the zealots to get hold of and upset things with”? Certainly not me! However, a few levers are still levers; and that there are only a few of them may, perversely, make it easier for them to be captured by zealots.
Thus, if a couple of Libertarian billionaires can spend many millions to lobby for laissez-faire economic policies of unilateral, international free trade and open borders for immigration, this is not a specially blessed form of governance even if it is nominally “minimal.” A decision that there shall be zero import tariffs must still be enforced at the point of a gun because a rogue state like Texas will still be tempted to levy tariffs and close the southern border themselves. In which case, a strong federal government will have to swoop in with as much force as is necessary to enforce the federal policy.
We are tempted to say that, well, at least the laissez-faire policy is the more “moral” policy. But on what grounds? That it provides more liberty? OK, but whose liberty and what liberty. It seems to me that what ordinary folks want is personal liberty: things like free speech, the right to go to work even if it is “non-essential”, the right to walk around in public without a mask on, without needing “papers” to buy food. Compared to the loss of these freedoms, the loss of liberty entailed by a 25% tariff on imported Chinese goods is nothing!
Moreover, to say that the intention of the laissez-faire policy “is not to favor some individuals at the cost of harming others” is utterly disingenuous because just like any other policy, a laissez-faire policy will of course favor some individuals while harming others. This should be obvious. Therefore, a laissez-faire policy ought to be subject to a cost-benefit analysis just like any other policy. At a minimum, we should expect that a given policy at least benefit more individuals than it harms. Let’s see…
Prior to the 1970’s, as Samuelson (2004) noted, the 2/3 of the country that comprise the working class in the USA were born with a sort “silver spoon in their mouth” thanks to the USA’s privileged position of being the wealthiest economy on the planet, (due mainly to its technological & managerial innovation–that happened despite the absense of willy-nilly international trade & a couple of million annual immigrants). Thus, the implementation of the laissez-faire twin policy of unilateral free trade and mass immigration has had predictable effects. Free trade meant U.S. workers had to compete against workers making a fraction of their wages; mass immigration imported workers willing to underbid the prevailing American rates. Declining or stagnant real wages inevitably ensued; wages became decoupled from rising productivity; the share of national income that went to labor declined.
Meanwhile, if the economic theory is to be believed (debatable), the USA economy overall reaped a dead-weight gain from the elimination of most tariffs. But since working class wages were stagnant at best, these gains instead flowed to the elite class — the meritocracy. More importantly, the loss in wages of the working class was the meritocracy’s gain: real wages for elites go up when the wages of the proletariats go down.
Thus the minimalist, Libertarian, laissez-faire twin policy wound up depressing the wages of an exploited majority in order to boost the wages of a privileged minority. Moreover, by what merit did the meritocracy deserve this bonus? None, as far as I can see.
Ordinarily, we would call this rent-seeking. But in this topsy-turvy world we call this morality embodied since Americans’ natural right to make deals with foreigners without having to pay taxes has been restored! Indeed, it is the workers who were making high wages prior to the implementation of laissez-faire who were the rent-seekers! It is they who did not deserve their abnormally high wages!
And people are still mystified as to where Trump came from…
Thomas Lee Hutcheson
Aug 12 2021 at 3:15pm
I do not think that (20th Century) liberals believe that government can in every decision, or even very often, find a Pareto Dominant position. They aspire to a Pareto Optimum that is more favorable for the least powerful than the Pareto Optimum that would result from unencumbered market forces stating from the pre-policy income distribution. Of course in the pretense of externalities, markets cannot achieve even a Pareto Optimum.
Pierre Lemieux
Aug 12 2021 at 3:32pm
Warren: Just two points that probably go at the root of your errors.
(1) You write:
Like the non-Jewish Germains as opposed to the Jewish minority? Or the white Southerners at the time of slavery or Jim Crow?
(2) In my post, I replied in advance to at least one of your objections. Remember what I wrote:
Warren Platts
Aug 12 2021 at 4:43pm
(1) Pierre: Sorry I did not explain myself better! What I was trying to say was that if it is bad enough that a government can cause individuals to get stuck in an exploited minority, it must necessarily be even worse when a government causes individuals to get stuck in an exploited majority. This principle should apply to even nominally laissez-faire trade policies.
The operative word here is “exploited”. Now that I think about it, I retract the statement that a policy must benefit more people than it harms. After all, affirmative action practically by definition is meant to help a minority at a cost to a majority. But is the majority being exploited in this case? Maybe, but maybe not.
(2) In your article you wrote:
The problem, as I see it, with your rejoinder is that one man’s liberty is another man’s non-liberty. An importer’s liberty to trade with foreign producers results in A home producer’s liberty to be free from competition from foreign producers who pay their workers a small fraction of the prevailing home wage, and have zero environmental and safety regulations to contend with creates a non-liberty for a home importer to trade with foreign producers tax-free — and vice versa.
So, in our Solomon-like wisdom, we have to rank liberties in order of importance. And surely, the liberty to conduct international trade tax-free has got to be at the lower end of importance. It is a small thing to have to pay a tariff, which, after all, is nothing but a glorified sales tax, no different than the sales taxes everybody pays anyway.
Pierre Lemieux
Aug 12 2021 at 11:52pm
Warren: Thanks for the precisions. On the second point you write:
This is not correct. In the classical-liberal perspective, liberty is defined in a way as to be co-possible among individuals. This is why it is nearly always viewed as negative liberty, that is, the absence of direct and coercive interference. If you define liberty positively as the right to things or the right to prevent your neighbor from doing something (say, buying from a third party who is willing to sell), then, of course, liberties clash all the time and Leviathan is indispensable.
Jon Murphy
Aug 12 2021 at 8:14pm
This may fall under the “Narrow Corridor” argument (I haven’t read the book), but what are your thoughts on the Smithian argument for government? Namely that, since resentment that comes from an injustice is felt most strongly by the one injured and his reaction is likely something “no impartial spectator could go along with,” a proper government could act as a jural superior. That is to say, the government could dish out punishment that will help ease the resentment the injured party feels while keeping the punishment in line with a proper response. In this reasoning, totally private governance wouldn’t necessarily be desirable because private actors would tend to overreact to their injuries.
(Smith outlines a few other roles for government, but I’d argue they are largely derived from this role of being the temperor to resentment)
Pierre Lemieux
Aug 12 2021 at 11:44pm
Jon: Yes, this Smithian argument would fall in the argument of The Narrow Corridor against the “cage of [traditional] norms.” It is also, of course, consistent with the standard Hobbesian argument for the state. Your last point is intriguing.
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