From Social To Legal Norms: A Neglected Cause of Big Government

From Social To Legal Norms: A Neglected Cause of Big Government

Description

The topic of Big Government is, it may fairly be said, a big question that has already spawned an enormous amount of controversy, if not acrimony. At times in our recent history, it seems as though the idea of Big Government has been vanquished from our domestic lexicon. Back in 1994 the Republicans rode to power on a social contract that promised to clip the tentacles of Big Government. President Clinton then chimed in with a State of the Union address in which he intoned that "the era of Big Government is over." But this joint revolution proved short-lived, as the Republicans have beaten a ragtag retreat from the ideal of Little Government, while former president Clinton made (in, for example, his 1999 State of the Union ad- dress) new promises to every interest group the central talking point of his second administration. The pressures to expand the use of government power often seem irresistible. It is tempting to increase the size of government by looking in isolation at the benefits induced by any single government program. It is much harder, given the tribulations of political life, to hew to the rigorous discipline that generates prosperity in the first place. Transfer programs do not create wealth. Only production can do that. Production in turn requires a focused government policy that builds a solid infrastructure and fosters strong private property rights and voluntary exchanges. In hard times, the necessity of returning to fundamentals to spur production should be evident. But once prosperity returns it is easy to forget that the discipline that brought prosperity in the first place is needed to keep prosperity alive. The great achievements of one generation will not of their own force last for the long run unless they are continuously replenished. Unfortunately, the rate of depreciation for sound social institutions and practices is so rapid that one generation cannot protect the next generation from its own mistakes. Yet it is easy to forget the fragility of political institutions; too often political leaders relax their guard and indulge in humanistic reforms whose major consequence is to undermine the engine of prosperity that made these reforms thinkable. The decline of political discipline never takes place because of frontal attack. In the abstract, everyone acknowledges that well-functioning markets can outproduce and outperform comprehensive command-and-control regulation. But the ostensible generality of that position is picked apart by endless ad hoc exceptions. The Democrats (and some Republicans) continue to show strong support for new increases in the minimum wage: After all, in periods of prosperity, the workers at the bottom of the pile are also "entitled to a raise," whether or not the employer wishes to pay it. The Republicans (and some Democrats) find it within their power to bless farm subsidies, as with the continuation of the ethanol program or strict import quotas on cane sugar for the benefit of domestic producers of the more expensive beet sugar. Leaders of both parties are quite happy to override private insurance markets in order to require worker portability of health care insurance in the face of preexisting conditions that cost more to service than the premiums received. It almost seems that once a political party announces that it is in favor of Little Government, it renders itself invulnerable to attack for the new or expanded forms of government intervention it champions. Intellectual consistency in political circles counts for less than the deft articulation of proper public sentiment. But no one should be deceived. Proclamations against Big Government may respond to the yearnings of the majority of the electorate, but these statements do not drive the mid-level choices on economic or social regulation. This initial dose of cynicism should not, however, lead us to ignore one important shift in the terms of the debate. At one time, Big Government needed no defense. It was thought that the political and constitutional debates of the Franklin Roosevelt era had established the proposition that the well-being of the American public was too important to be left to the vagaries of the market, driven as it was by selfish and shortsighted behavior. Today, fewer people think that private actors have a monopoly on either of these two vices. The gradual reversal of the presumption in favor of Big Government stems from the belated recognition that competitive pressures may provide a needed check against the worst of human impulses, to which government servants are not immune. The evils of private misconduct are checked not by an opposing faction or high-minded regulation but by the simple ability of customers to switch firms when the goods and services that they receive are no longer acceptable. The Internal Revenue Service has never labored under that constraint, so its customer relations take on a rather different coloration from those of a fashionable restaurant or shop. Private monopolies do not behave well, even though they are subject to erosion and decay and, in some instances, government regulation which could easily pull the franchise for inadequate service. Why assume that public monopolies behave any better when they may be propped up indefinitely by the force of law?

Source Publication

Politics at the Turn of the Century

Source Editors/Authors

Arthur M. Melzer, Jerry Weinberger, M. Richard Zinman

Publication Date

2001

From Social To Legal Norms: A Neglected Cause of Big Government

Find @ NYU

Share

COinS