DISQUS

TGGP · 11 months ago

Can't I be an anarchist who thinks it's possible for government to be a lesser degree of bad and also desire that to be the case if I can't have anarchy?

The Federalists were dead wrong and the Anti-Federalists were right in all their predictions about how the new Constitutional government would act. So why do we still hold them in such adulation as master architects of fault-proof government? Why does nobody remember their correct opponents?

Ed Lopez · 11 months ago

"Voice of reason" on a post about the Enlightenment. Is that a pun?

Your post is why I consider myself a philosophical anarchist. I would love to have a government to which I could in good conscience consent. But I know of no political institutional arrangements that have not led to plunder or otherwise morally illegitimate acts of state. On the other hand, governments can be pretty handy--not for economic reasons like roads or defense, which are better left to markets, but as focal points for organizing public interaction in beneficial ways. I don't expect perfection from markets, so I do support even imperfect governments if they have mechanisms for enforcing things like anti-corruption norms. A government that prosecutes corrupt government officials is better than one that doesn't. Our big problem is that fewer and fewer people give a crap about principle and want to outsource responsibility to the state.

Rationalitate · 11 months ago

So either go ahead and come out as an anarchist or swallow your iconoclastic loathing of “good government” pap and admit that you want better government. I want better government!

Anarchy, please!

DWAnderson · 11 months ago

I am an anarchist who wants better government.

Steve Horwitz · 11 months ago

Well... I'm not sure that I think government is "unreformable." I do think we'd have better government if government had less power. So in that sense, I think it's reformable. But differently - I don't think you need to leap all the way to anarchy to improve matters. There are ways to make government better.

My point was that in the current climate, under the current institutional arrangements, complaining about politicians selling their power for cash while others bailout those who will do them the most electoral good seems to me to require some level of cognitive dissonance.

Will Wilkinson · 11 months ago

Steve, The thing is, I don't think it requires much cognitive dissonance because "constituent service" and "helping American industry" passes as honest politics while "selling senate seats" doesn't. I think it's worth reinforcing that a lot of what passes as honest politics is really an abuse of power, not all that different from selling Senate seats, and suggesting ways to make that less likely. But there's an important difference in criticizing abuse, and suggesting how this might be prevented or limited, and lamenting the fact that there is power to abuse at all.

Steve Horwitz · 11 months ago

Also: Ed is very often a voice of reason - certainly compared to me!

Cool Cal · 11 months ago

Now Will,

Pardon me for stating the obvious but somewhere between advocating anarchy and submitting oneself to the will of politicians we trusted one day, but then woke up the next to find they had power, doesn't there lie the concept of checks and balances, gridlock, etc. The efficacy of power conflict, wherein the actors butt up against each other and properly cancel each other out, has been sufficiently weakened and power among our legislators has increased - but is that not the proper hedge against what many of us believe to be the ultimate vice in government. Rather than better government would it not be more useful, if we are to pine for something unachievable, to hope for a more effectual utilization of political gridlock, checks and balances, and the like?

Will Wilkinson · 11 months ago

Cal, I think you're laying out some principles for good government, all of which may be found in the Federalist.

Tim Lee · 11 months ago

Will, I think you're being too hard on Horwitz. Obviously, given that the government is going to perform a certain task, we should prefer that it do so more rather than less effectively. And obviously at the margin, there there are reforms that can enhance the performance of governments. I don't take Horwitz to be denying this simple and obvious point. Rather, his point is that given that government officials often do behave this way (and it's indisputable that for every Blogojevich and Stevens who blatantly betray the public trust there are a dozen others who do so more subtly and are not caught) we should be skeptical about giving governments new powers that they didn't previously enjoy. We should not, say, give the executive branch unfettered authority to hand out tens of billions of dollars to banks, or to micromanage the auto industry.

I think Munger overstates the case a bit, and does come across as denying that government can ever be made to work better or worse. But surely you'll agree that making government work well is a lot harder than most non-libertarians acknowledge, and that incidents like this one serve as a useful reality check for those who romanticize the workings of government and the public-spiritedness of public servants.

Will Wilkinson · 11 months ago

I agree that Blago illustrates that opportunities for corruption produce corruption and we should spot and limit similar opportunities. And, yeah, it's hard to make government work well. The public choice guys are right that its more about structure than public-spiritedeness. It is laughably naive and romantic to think that sufficient public-spiritedness will deliver good government. But it remains that we WANT good government, and public-spiritedness helps. Libertarians seem loathe to admit this, and I think it's a problem for us.

Kevin B. O'Reilly · 11 months ago

As a lifelong Chicagoan who has worked in the past investigating political corruption in the city, I can tell you that what prevails here is a complicated mix of badly designed rules and baleful cultural norms of politics that have evolved over time. Disentangling the two is nearly impossible. There are many "good government" liberals here whose reform ideas I support. Where we part ways is that while we both agree that, for example, Blagojevich's having sole discretion over millions of dollars in hospital reimbursement funds was a structural mistake, they don't extend that analysis to the question of whether, say, the Treasury Dept. or a "car czar" should have a say over vast swaths of American economic activity. I don't see the error here as the libertarians' opposing "good government" reforms (which obviously we don't) but of the left and right's failure to recognize that good government is in fact necessarily contingent on limited government.

Unit · 11 months ago

"We need better government". That's pretty clear.

But if you say "we need better politicians", then I disagree.

The problem is that better government can only be gotten via better politicians.....

So when faced with this conundrum we can go two ways: either we romanticize the political process and raise it above any particular goal that may be pursued (democratic fundamentalism), or we cynically slam the political process at every turn and hope that more light will shine on our beautiful ideals.

Will Wilkinson · 11 months ago

We need both better politicians and better constraints on what politicians can do.

Unit · 11 months ago

Rereading myself I can see that I didn't explain myself very well.

I agree that the goal is better government and better politicians. The question is how do we get there? Assuming that only politicians can reform the current system, we are forced to start by picking better politicians. Yet I don't have much faith in that approach. I think politicians are hopeless. Maybe a better approach would be to reclaim the lost checks-and-balances from outside the system, by reinforcing civil-society, private agreements, the judiciary etc...as much as possible. It's not as glamorous but I don't see other ways.

William · 11 months ago

Encouraging “anti-corruption” and “civic responsibility” is a silly solution. These norms aren't special; they are just the governmental analogues of honesty and caring for others. We already have norms for these things, and they are enormously important. In restaurants, people are expected to pay for their meals after they've eaten, and they do it (they even tip their servers). But in a society where people are, on average, rather honest and selfless, you ought to wonder why this huge organization, government, seems to attract people who are below average on these measures.

Norms of honesty and caring make transactions easier and less costly, but they are limited in what they can do. It's hopelessly idealistic to design a system that makes corruption reward-maximizing while thinking that you can just instill an anti-corruption norm that will neutralize this effect. In setting up a government, as with any corporation, we need to take the amount of corruption in society as given, and figure out how to design a system that doesn't reward that corruption.

I'm not an anarchist in that I don't really care one way or the other whether we have some entity called "government," but I don't believe we can claim that once we have something called "government," the normal rules of economics no longer apply.

mk · 11 months ago

you ought to wonder why this huge organization, government, seems to attract people who are below average on these measures.

Do we know they are below average? The big question seems to be how much of it is institutional, and how much chalked up to "bad people." I'd bet heavily on the former, since I believe in environmental factors and incentives as a primary cause of human good and bad deeds.

Kevin B. O'Reilly · 11 months ago

*If only* there were *some* libertarian *somehwere* -- perhaps even in Chicago, perhaps even a member of the Tribune's editorial board that Blagojevich allegedly targeted for mass firings -- could make an argument for "good government." Alas! Oh, wait ...
http://tinyurl.com/6k4476

Will Wilkinson · 11 months ago

Kevin, Excellent. I think Chapman approaches it from exactly the right angle: that the power of governors to appoint senators is insane.

GilM · 11 months ago

Will,

What do you mean by better government?

Do you want, as Tim suggests: "Obviously, given that the government is going to perform a certain task, we should prefer that it do so more rather than less effectively." ?

Do you want government to be more effective at enforcing victimless crime laws, tax collection, ridiculous regulations, immigration laws, etc?

If not, then what does "better" government mean to you, and how does that differ from what Horwitz and Munger want?

Cool Cal · 11 months ago

I suppose the major distinction here is better "government", meaning those actors and entities which comprise the government at hand, or better "system of government", whereby our judgment of said government's agents would drastically differ scenario by scenario, regardless of their individual moral fortitude and virtues.

wph · 11 months ago

I think the libertarians who believe that these occasional government scandals prove that government is irredeemably corrupt are the counterpart to the leftists who believe that the occasional corporate scandal proves that capitalism is irredeemably corrupt.

Butler T. Reynolds · 10 months ago

Last spring my house was burglarized. The thief made quite a mess of my place while he was looking for his loot to haul out of my back door that he smashed in.

Next time, I want a better thief who doesn't make such a mess.
:-)

Neverfox · 10 months ago

Will,

Whenever there is a desire for "better" goods and services, do you typically expect the best approach to be the support of a monopoly on these goods and services?

Steve Roth · 11 months ago

No duh. But, thanks for saying it.

Reagan was absolutely, fundamentally wrong: government is not the problem. Bad government is the problem.

A certain amount of government (and associated redistributive policies) is necessary for a modern, prosperous, high-productivity economy to operate. (The only way to maintain aggregate demand and avoid meltdowns.) All evidence suggests that the proper amount requires taxes in the 30-40% of GDP range--slightly to significantly north of the U.S. at 28%.

For a century we've teetered at the bottom edge of that workable amount. We fell off the edge catastrophically once before, and now we've done it again. In both cases we crashed everybody else, too--even those with responsible levels of government who would have gone along fine except for our irresponsibility.

It's time for libertarians and conservatives to put aside childish things and magical thinking, and contribute creatively within the context of what is actually workable, reasonable, and prosperity-generating in a modern political economy.