I will probably run for some sort of local office in the next year or so, and if I'm to do it I guess I'd better start outlining my core beliefs.Here's what I think about government and freedom.
"We need to reduce the size of government". We hear this sentence so often from the laissez-fair libertarian crowd, and we always find ourselves on the defensive. We get so caught up in defending government's current "size" that we don't take the time to question the underlying premise. In much the same way that hapless guy falls into the verbal trap "When did you stop beating your wife", we try to respond to these fatuous claims as if government had a size. In the next few paragraphs (pages? I'm not sure yet) I'm going to try to convince you that it doesn't. That talking about "less government" makes about as much sense as a fish complaining about too much water. Here goes.
Let's start by giving the Tea Party and their admirers the benefit of the doubt—that government had a definite size, and that "more" government translates into "less" freedom. The name of the movement of course is meant to evoke images of the American Revolution, of a time when we had "small" government and a "large" amount of freedom. At the time life was pretty simple—we lived in small villages and we had clear property rights because those who owned anything owned goats, chickens, houses, cabbages, wood for burning, and let's not forget slaves. People lucky enough to own stuff knew they owned it, and because they could vote, they didn't mind paying taxes for that sort of security. Even then, property rights didn't grow on trees. They came from somewhere, and were enforced by law. Even someone who owns physical land today puts his faith in government when he puts up a sign saying "Trespassers will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law". Or he would expect the government to permit him to lay barbed wire, man traps and spring guns without having to worry about penalties in the event of deployment.
That was then. As our country expanded across the continent, the role of government increased as we signed treaties, chartered villages, towns, and cities, and fought wars. Indeed it was government that warrantied the settling of the West, in the form of things like the Homestead Act of 1862. Imagine that—at the stroke of a pen, each citizen got "freehold title" to 160 acres of unincorporated land. This meant that once you staked out your 160 acres, it was up to government (of some sort) to enforce your legal claim. It was also up to the government to spell out the details of exactly what that title. To get that title you were expected to "improve the land". Vague expressions like "improve the land" are a source of job security for civil servants the world over. I'm not talking about politicians, but about the technocrats who are tasked with determining exactly what it means to improve land. We're told in school that interpretation of the law is the bailiwick of the judicial branch. In fact, if judges had the exclusive responsibility to turn statutes into policies and policies into regulations, civil society would collapse. I can imagine clerks in Washington, reviewing one title application after another, having to "call balls and strikes" as Chief Justice Roberts put it. (Roberts will be remembered as being one of the people whose great conceit was to think that he was a legal automaton who rigorously abided by a "strict construction" of the constitution). Even after people had settled it was up to the government to determine ownership when titles were modified as they changed hands and contracts included clauses about things like minerals, coal, and oil.
Already, this destroys the idea that government and freedom are somehow inversely proportional. Government enabled clearly enabled the Wild West, that avatar of freedom that led inexorably to Cowboy and Indian movies, and Cowboy and Indian movie stars, one of whom went on to become the quintessential anti-government President. Ironic, no?
Is this to say that if we hadn't expanded in physical territory, we would have had less government? Doubtful. Indeed, no country can expand forever physically. In order to live decently in a limited space, there are really only two options: stealing or dealing. Consider, for example, the miners that were recently rescued in Chile. They shared a confined space, and they made it out alive because they dealt. They dealt with each other by allotting food that was given to them, and the all earned their keep by working with their rescuers to get themselves out. In contrast, there's nothing more tragic than the lethal stampedes that routinely occur at sporting events, musical concerts, holiday sales and religious observances because of finite space and a complete absence of structure. These sorts of tragedies are the result of "stealing" in the most horrific sense.
The problem is that "deals" don't grow on trees. Is it reasonable to expect a crowd of sports fans after a game to proceed to a limited number of exits in an orderly fashion without the provision of structure? Hardly. In a sane world, it would be the contractual obligation of the stadium owners to ensure that people don't pay for a game with their lives. Similarly it would be the legal responsibility of a big box store to make sure that its employees don't pay the ultimate price for toys and stereos. But even if it weren't, you'd still need government to absolve the stadium and/or store of that legal responsibility. Is it meaningful to talk about whether this "increases" or "decreases" the size of government? No. All you've done here is move government from one side of the balance sheet to the other. The net change is zero.
Speaking of big box stores, let's put ourselves in your favorite omnibus big box store right now. Here they sell groceries, air conditioners, paper, toiletries, bicycles, oil changes and safety inspections, pharmaceuticals, laptops, ipods, and lots of other things that I lack the time or imagination to think of. Each of these items is inextricably entwined with much more abstract forms of property whose very existence is contingent on a central authority, a referee, a (there's that dirty word again) government!
Let's start with oil inspections and safety inspections. In many states we're required by law to get safety inspections—that way when we drive we can be assured that everybody else is driving a safe car, too. So auto-mechanics get certified to inspect cars to make sure that the brakes and shocks work, the wipers are able to get rain off, and that your car isn't spewing toxic gas into the air we all breathe. In the US the states are responsible for licenses to issue inspections. And they are responsible for periodic auditing (which could include "secret shopping") of people who perform inspections. Let's say you get a safety or emissions inspection and your vehicle happens to fail—the next step would be to get it serviced, and reinspected. All of these transactions are between individuals, neither of whom is "the government" and yet the transactions themselves are mandated by law, and duly enforced. The car itself , whose oil you're changing, has an internal combustion engine, which was invented by Karl Benz. He was able to make money off of his invention because his government's patent office grants patents to inventors, which give them temporary monopoly over their idea. Similarly, air conditioners, bicycles, pharmaceuticals, laptops, mp3 players, and even some groceries were all either incentivized by government issuance of patents or by direct funding of basic research. As with westward migration, government created property.
And that's just the existence of the merchandise. How about the sale? Consider groceries. The grocery store buys vegetables from distributors, who buy them from farms. Farms in turn buy seeds. I've seen job listings for seed inspectors! When I first saw that job listing I remember thinking "what a weird job"--but isn't it something somebody has to do? And they do it using scientific tools paid for with government investment in basic research. The same goes for the encryption protocols used to transmit money electronically when you make your payment at the cash register whether you're using a credit card or a benefit card. The kind of sophisticated cryptography that allows people to transfer money electronically wouldn't exist without government funded research into basic science. The satellites that relay that transaction to some secure server come to you courtesy of the Department of Defense and the ideals of JFK. If you write a check, you're expected to produce government ID, whether it's a driver's license or a passport. And of course you could pay in notes that are printed by the US Treasury. If you buy something under warranty, you have the government to back you up on that too—or you don't, because the big box store hired lawyers to write the fine print in the warranties saying that they couldn't be enforced through the courts.
What about the store itself? The store is probably getting a huge break in terms of its use of municipal services—sewer, electrical cable, telephone, roads. All of this, and a tax break.
Why are you at the store in the first place? Did you see an ad for something on TV? And how do you know it's at that particular store? Well, let's say you're there to buy a toy you saw on an ad on TV. On that ad, you might have been told that the toy is available at this particular big box store. That's probably because the wholesaler, as one of the terms of its sale to the big box store, was told it couldn't sell the toy anywhere else. That contract, like all contracts, is enforced by somebody. And it's hard to imagine how that somebody would be anything other than a government, isn't it?
And of course the ad is being broadcast over television. In England, after World War Two, there was a period during which there were real problems with "pirate radio". Allow me to digress. Have you ever tried to tune a radio, but found that your favorite station was broadcasting at the same frequency as another one. One way of solving this problem, from the perspective of your favorite station, would be to get a bigger, more powerful tower. Of course, the other station might respond in kind. Before you know it, they're in a shouting match. Or they broadcast on different frequencies, and before you know it the entire spectrum is a complete mess. It's only because the government regulates the use of the radio spectrum that anyone is able to "own" the right to broadcast at a particular frequency or set of frequencies. Of course, this isn't to say that's a bad thing; indeed without these sorts of parameters laid out by a central authority such as the FCC, we'd either a) all be trying to outshout each other and turning all our radios into garbage or b) we'd give way to a fascism resulting from not being able to outshout the guy with the biggest most powerful transmitter. President George W. Bush used to trumpet the virtues of an "ownership society" without bothering with the specifics of what, exactly, we own. I can own a bicycle, or a laptop—but as soon as we get into ownership of the more abstract things sch as these it's impossible to imagine a world in which government doesn't play a critical role in defining property and ownership.
This last part is very instructive. Two hundred years ago, when people owned goats, chickens, a well, and a little piece of earth, a laissez-faire Utopia might have made sense (of course, they also lived with tuberculosis, typhoid, and smallpox). Today we own things like debt obligations, warranties, insurance policies, leases, patents, trademarks, copyrights, movie rights, water rights, radio frequencies, bank accounts, diplomas, pensions, and degrees. Do any of these things have any meaning whatsoever without government? No. Indeed, they're created by government out of whole cloth. And that's not to mention the positive freedoms we all enjoy because of government. Freedom from all sorts of childhood and adult diseases (people are still wearing those shirts and hats that say "FREEDOM ISN'T FREE". Having contracted with New York State's health department—I can attest to how right they are), access to safe, clean drinking water, confidence in commercial transactions, access to courts in the event that somebody cheats you, and access to a basic education regardless of your parents' economic status.
Apologists for today's ludicrously named "Tea Party" can have their goats and their chickens and their typhoid and cholera. I look forward to a brighter future.