TGIF: Why Wouldn't Government Grow?

One of the least mysterious things in life is why the government grows. The better question is why it ever shrinks. People who devote lots of time to thinking about the importance of individual liberty know that government is inimical to human flourishing. So they notice every sign of state growth. But most people rarely if ever focus on liberty or government per se because they understandably are busy with the usual cares and aspirations of life. Even if they occasionally sense that something ominous is afoot, they can do little about it. They might as well attend to things that are more under their control.

Besides, most people believe what they were brought up to believe by their parents and teachers: that the U.S. government system embodies liberty because the people "govern themselves" through the representatives they have chosen. When they complain about the government, their ire is typically directed at specific bad apples or even a bad regime. They are rarely mad at the system itself. All will be put right when good people replace the bad. But when replacements occur we don't see significant reductions in the power and scope of the state. Things are bad enough with domestic policy but much worse with foreign policy. The picture is bleak indeed. 

Meanwhile, the people in power have a general interest in increasing that power, not to mention their wealth and prestige. So with rare exceptions they are accelerators of, not brakes on, the growth of government power. (The Public Choice school of political economy focuses on the incentives for the growth of government.) Sometimes a political figure touts his or her preference for less power in a particular matter (sincerely or not), but such a figure usually favors more power in other matters. Over the years the number of politicians who actually have wanted less government across the board has been depressingly small.

Those in power are supported in their quest for more by an array of private interests who hope to gain by the exercise of that power. Lots of people are unsatisfied with the gains they could make through purely voluntary exchange, so they seek to augment them with the help of politicians and bureaucrats and at the expense of others. These "rent-seekers" may not think of this as violating other people's freedom because they believe, like nearly everyone else, that this is what a self-governing people may properly do. It's as though the state were the governing body of a voluntary service organization. Members vote on what policies they want, and then they go along with the majority decision.

That's how most people see the situation. But the state is not such an organization. It's a force-wielding wealth-transfer machine with a dash of security services for public appeal. The role of court ideologues, the government schools, and the mass media is to tell the people how good and indispensable the government is. In fact the state is the consequence of conquest: no one ever explicitly consented to it, and it's impossible to opt out (that is, while staying put). How can anyone withdraw consent never given? And if one cannot not consent, what does it even mean to consent? (See Charles Johnson's "Can Anyone Ever Consent to the State?")

So as Jefferson noted, "The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield, and government to gain ground." This doesn't mean a specific power can't be rolled back on occasion. We've seen the removal of legal barriers to racial integration, marijuana possession, gay marriage, and other legitimate activities, but despite this, it's hard to see a significant reduction in power in recent times. The invasive PATRIOT Act is nearly 20 years old and has been reauthorized more than once. The politicians used the pandemic to justify extraordinary and alarming interference with our liberty. New powers are in the offing, such as regulation of social-media companies.

Does this mean there's nothing left to do but despair? I have no easy answers, but let's hope not. The fight for liberty is the noblest fight, and we must find ways to kindle the love of liberty in others.

TGIF: A Public Choice Perspective on Trade

Let's say you could make a strictly economic case for government interference with people's trading activities, that is, with their ability to cooperate freely with others across the world. (I have no idea what "strictly economic case" even means, but stay with me.) Would we free traders have to give up? No way.

Why not? Because we could deploy solid persuasive public choice arguments against such interference. I like to think of the Public Choice school of political economy (Buchanan, Tullock, et al.) as emphasizing the incentive problem inherent in government policymaking. Where the Austrians emphasize varieties of the knowledge problem -- policymakers cannot know what they must know to plan our economic activities intelligently -- the Public Choice school focuses on, among other things, the perverse incentives that policymakers, bureaucrats, and citizens face.

Before public choice came along, people tended to operate on a public-interest model of policymaking. They simply assumed that when a man or woman moved from the profit-seeking private sector to the (misnamed) public, or political, sector, he or she suddenly became single-mindedly devoted to the public interest. Egoism gave way to altruism. (Note the additional assumptions that there is such a thing as the public interest and that "public servants" know what it is.) This devotion need not be examined or even questioned; it was axiomatic. If a politician was exposed as corrupt, he was merely an outlier, like the supposed lone "bad apple" who slaughtered noncombatants at My Lai during the U.S. government's war in Vietnam.

The Public Choice school questioned the hitherto unquestionable. Perhaps, its proponents said, if we assume that people acting politically are similar to people acting privately, we could make better predictions about outcomes. This simple move exposed the conventional perspective as naive. Of course, people are people, whether acting privately or politically. All are interested in looking after themselves -- in raising their incomes, influence, and prestige. Political actors are not issued halos and wings when they enter government jobs. But the resistance to the public choice orientation has persisted, and you can detect the opposing model every day -- most especially from newscasters and pundits.

I should add that Robert Higgs makes an important point on this matter. Yes, people are indeed people, but people who are attracted to power are not exactly like the rest of us. Lord Acton famously said that "power tends to corrupt," but Higgs adds, in effect, that power also lures the already corrupted. This makes the public choice case even stronger.

Thus the public choice and Austrian critiques together deliver a one-two knockout punch to government interference with social cooperation. Contrary to the civics textbooks and pundits, politicians and bureaucrats lack 1) insight into what's really good for us who constitute the public and 2) the incentive to pursue it even if they knew what it was. Even if voters sincerely intend to benefit all of society and not just their own personal interests (as Bryan Caplan suggests), that doesn't mean those good intentions will be carried into policy. Human beings enact and execute policies.

Now let's talk about trade. Gather round, folks, and I'll tell you the story of the great Chicken War of the 1960s. In response to lobbying by special interests, France and Germany raised tariffs on cheap American chicken imports. To "retaliate," the U.S. government put a 25 percent tariff on (all countries') light trucks, potato starch, dextrin, and brandy. The truck tariff, which was known as the "chicken tax," was specifically targeted at Germany. The chicken war lasted from 1961 to 1964, and then it ended -- except for one aspect. The tariff on light trucks stayed in place and exists to this day. (For an accounting of the significant unintended consequences of this tariff, see Bryce Hoffman's "If You Aren't Worried about a Trade War, You Don't Know about the Chicken Tax.")

If the truck tax was retaliation for the European chicken tariff, and the chicken tariff disappeared, why does the truck tax still exist?

It's not hard to answer that question. Behind the truck tax was a powerful lobby that didn't give a hoot about America's chicken farmers. That lobby enjoyed its protection against foreign pickup trucks, not only German but also Japanese. So why would the automakers want to let go of their shelter from competition merely because the chicken farmers were freed from their foreign tax? They wouldn't, and they didn't. As a result, Americans pay more for pickups than should have to. (Bryce Hoffman notes that the tariff would have disappeared with the Trans-Pacific Partnership.)

Note the public choice lesson. Bad unintended consequences will likely flow from government policy, regardless of intentions, because it will be driven by concentrated and well-organized special interests and politicians who usually will be more sensitive to those interests, which can deploy money and votes, than to consumers, who are diffuse and unorganized. (We might say that the consumers' interest is the best approximation of the public interest.)

That's only part of the picture. Whenever the government has the power to interfere with our trade, it also has the power to exert leverage on others, including other governments, that may have nothing to do with trade. Thomas Jefferson loved to impose trade embargoes, which he called "peaceful coercion." This week Donald Trump delayed for 30 days the imposition of new tariffs on imported steel and aluminum from the European Union, Canada, and Mexico. He also moved toward canceling those tariffs for Australia, Brazil, Argentina. Is he seeking something in return for scrapping the tariffs? Is he telling the Europeans that if they do not support his hawkish position on Iran, he will go ahead with the trade restrictions? What did he get in return from the other countries?

We don't know. But if Trump has the power to restrict trade, he has the power to forgo restrictions in return for other things he wants -- and those other things are unlikely to be good for most Americans, not to mention the rest of the world.

David Hume said that in proposing government policy, we should assume that the people who will carry them out are "knaves." That of course means trade policy too.

TGIF (The Goal Is Freedom) appears on Fridays. Sheldon Richman, author of America's Counter-Revolution: The Constitution Revisited, keeps the blog Free Association and is executive editor of The Libertarian Institute. He is also a senior fellow and chair of the trustees of the Center for a Stateless Society and a contributing editor at Antiwar.com.

Become a Free Association patron today!

TGIF: What the Left Should Like about Public Choice

Although the public choice school of political economy has been demonized in a new work of putatively progressive fiction masquerading as intellectual history, good-faith leftists (if they don’t already regard themselves as libertarians) may be surprised by how their cause could benefit from the insights of James Buchanan et al.
Read TGIF at The Libertarian Institute.

TGIF (The Goal Is Freedom) appears on Fridays. Sheldon Richman, author of America's Counter-Revolution: The Constitution Revisited, keeps the blog Free Association and is executive editor of The Libertarian Institute. He is also a senior fellow and chair of the trustees of the Center for a Stateless Society and a contributing editor at Antiwar.com. Become a Free Association patron today!

Unlimited Limited Government

One thing that bothers me about the idea of limited government is how unlimited it is. After all the acknowledged illegitimate departments are eliminated, what's left? Only the IRS (perhaps under another name), the police/courts/prison complex, and the military. Lovers of liberty are supposed to be comforted by that program? Those are the three most threatening parts of the state -- and they are left standing! (Minarchists may object that I assume the taxman won't face unemployment, but have no doubts about this. A monopoly state without the power to tax is as imaginable as a square circle.) I'd feel much better if all that remained were the department of motor vehicles and the bureau of weights and measures.

Minarchists may try to reassure us that the remaining departments will be strictly limited by a constitution. To evaluate that claim, consult the Public Choice literature and the work of Anthony de Jasay. Also American history.

A Foreign Policy By and For Knaves

David Hume (1711-1776) was no hardcore libertarian, but he was a provocative thinker and a key figure in the development of liberalism. Hume helped make the Scottish Enlightenment the important period it was. He also can be fun to read. Observe this from his essay “Of the Independency of Parliament”:

Political writers have established it as a maxim, that, in contriving any system of government, and fixing the several checks and controuls of the constitution, every man ought to be supposed a knave, and to have no other end, in all his actions, than private interest. By this interest we must govern him, and, by means of it, make him, notwithstanding his insatiable avarice and ambition, co-operate to public good. Without this, say they, we shall in vain boast of the advantages of any constitution, and shall find, in the end, that we have no security for our liberties or possessions, except the good-will of our rulers; that is, we shall have no security at all.

Read it all here.

TGIF: Sequestration and the Chimera of the Informed Voter

Sequestration is not a disaster in the making, but how's the average person supposed to know that? I look in this question in my latest TGIF: "Sequestration and the Chimera of the Informed Voter."