Return of the Dysfunctional Duo
I was watching the highlights of Sarah Palin’s appearance on behalf of John McCain. Do you think it bothers ol’ John that whereas 18 months ago he was the one doing Palin a favor, now the roles are clearly reversed?
One of the make-’em-salivate bits o’ boilerplate that Palin threw out in favor of a vote for that mavericky maverick was that he knows that “the government governs best that governs least.” This bromide is nonsense, patent medicine for the feebs. It opposes nothing. No one is suggesting we need moregovernment, thereby advocating that the government that governs most governs best. However, we could use better government, and unless the conservative types are advocating anarchy or a return to a pastoral state of nature, this is the only formulation that works–better, not more or less.
In other words, it’s not the size of your government that matters, it’s how you use it that counts. Heck, it’s not even the intrusiveness of your government that matters, but how and where it intrudes.
Enlightenment philosophers spent a lot of time wondering about the necessity and purposes of government, and quickly realized that while every human has natural rights, no one is obliged to respect ‘em unless you have some entity to serve as a guarantor. Without that guarantor, things are very simple: you shout, “Give me liberty or give me death!” and some caveman runs up behind you and hits you over the head with a club. He does the same thing if you’re gassing up your car and saying, “Give me regular and give me premium” or at Starbucks saying, “Give me latte or give me cappuccino.” No matter what you ask for, you just get conked. And not only that, he doesn’t pick up the trash every Thursday morning, so one night you wake up and the baby has been devoured by rats.
Maybe you know of another way of organizing human society, but we’ve been at this game for thousands of years and this is the one we’ve picked. Ours is the most recent and best form, a contract between the government and the governed in which the latter says, “You are given a limited grant to make decisions for us. We retain certain privileges, like the right to call you an asshole if you bungle the job. Another right we’re retaining is that if we don’t like how you do it, a few years from now we’re going to give someone else a try. Good luck.” In the spirit of making the whole thing work, we concede certain other things, like our right to keep every penny we earn (taxes being necessary to make the government go) or to drive 150 miles per hour on the freeway. If we don’t concede these things, then you’re not only back to the caveman and his club, but now he runs you off the road into a tree instead of hitting you over the head.
Yes, like it or not, government is something we’re stuck with, and it has a purpose to fulfill. It seems ignorant, then, to say that the least government is the best government, when really the best government has nothing to do with size and everything to do with quality. Moreover, it seems especially tone-deaf to look around at the current landscape and say that we’re suffering from a surfeit of government. In the absence of government of Wall Street we’ve had a huge financial meltdown. In the absence of government of medicine we have a health care system that doesn’t work and, as we have seen, really resists being fixed. In the absence of the government trying to stimulate employment, we’ve got unemployment.
Florida Rep Alan Grayson was on TV yesterday (a nicely blunt appearance; see below) saying that Palin doesn’t understand most of what she’s talking about. This seems yet another example. Can’t really blame her this time, given that “governs best/governs least” has been the unthinking mantra of the right since before the New Deal, but it would be nice if instead of repeating dogma that is now nearly a century old, some one might actually think once about what they’re saying. It would also be good to see someone step up with a rejoinder that steered the conversation in the direction of common sense: the mission is not to get rid of government but to make it the best government that it can be.
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March 27th, 2010 at 10:29 am
Steve wrote: No one is suggesting we need more government….
Huh? Obama and the Dems have massively increased the size of government and propose even more of the same with Cap and Trade. 110 new bureacracies in Health Care, takeover of GM, takeover of Student Loan Program, governemnt supplied long term care insurance, etc. etc.
Your video of Congressman Grayson claiming Reps are promoting violence and misleading the public is unconvincing. If you linked to actual evidence, that would be a different story. In particular, it’s ludicrous to allege that when Palin proposed that Grayson be put out of office she was endorsing violence. She wants him not to be re-elected, as is appropriate for someone in the other party.
March 27th, 2010 at 12:12 pm
“Yes, like it or not, government is something we’re stuck with, and it has a purpose to fulfill. It seems ignorant, then, to say that the least government is the best government, when really the best government has nothing to do with size and everything to do with quality.”
Amen.
March 27th, 2010 at 10:19 pm
“this bromide is nonsense”, “it seems ignorant”, “dogma nearly a century old” –actually it is over 2 centuries old and was first uttered by Thomas Jefferson. This is the first time I have ever heard his statements called “nonsense” and Jefferson was anything but ignorant. Others, such as Nobel prize winner Milton Friedman, have said the same type of thing
March 28th, 2010 at 7:56 am
Yes David, but not for the mere sake of adding bureaucracy, and I think you know that. Whereas today’s Republicans would happily kill off any given program, except for Defense, simply because “Government=Bad,” regardless of merit.
March 28th, 2010 at 10:04 am
I agree that we can’t have the kind of tiny government that worked in Jefferson’s day. But that still leaves the question of whether we’d be better off today with a somewhat bigger government or somewhat smaller. One way to answer is to look at pairs of places with comparable cultures, but different size government. E.g. Shanghai vs Hong Kong. E. Germany vs. W. Germany, Texas vs. California, N. Korea vs. S. Korea., Eastern Europe vs. western Europe. In each of these cases, the jurisdiction with the larger, more intrusive government was economically poorer, and generally less haappy..
March 29th, 2010 at 5:35 pm
@David: I smell cherry picking. I’m not going to generate a list, but I don’t think it would be hard to find counter-examples. How about the nanny-state Scandinavian countries, which have the happiest citizenry on earth and remain prosperous? Or hey, Afghanistan doesn’t have a very effective government right now, I bet Libertarians are emigrating there in droves.