LB, do you know Barbara Fried's "The Progressive Assault on Laissez Faire: Robert Hale and the First Law and Economics Movement"?
It's very, very good on this issue, and makes an argument quite similar to yours.
Egg-cellent, LB. Something about that argument in Henley's piece bothered me, and I couldn't put my finger on it.
But libertarians of course (generally) don't want *no* government. They think it critical to have a gov't that ensures their physical liberties and protects basic property rights, for example. Which wipes away your Snidely/Tess hypo. So it's not clear at all to me that the idea of "giving less power to the government" is useless. If you think the gov't is particularly well-suited to abuse power, especially insofar as it has a special kind of coercive power that private parties lack, this seems to be a reasonable policy goal. That being said, questions about transparency, accountability, and control are crucial, or should be, to any libertarian, for precisely the reasons you mention.
IANAL(ibertarian).
Excellent. For the heck of it, I took a Marxist Libertarian line in Andrew's thread, but wasn't challenged and it wasn't well thought out.
The basic idea is that if the gov't stays out of the way, the unions/workers will win, or at least be able to negotiate a mutually acceptable contract with capital.
They think it critical to have a gov't that ensures their physical liberties and protects basic property rights, for example. Which wipes away your Snidely/Tess hypo.
No it doesn't -- it only wipes it away if the government they want works perfectly. The point is that it doesn't; that a government whose powers are limited to the protection of property rights can still be used to oppress.
and 1: No, I haven't. I'll look it up.
I think another useful angle in this argument is that corporations really do tend to take power in very real ways. If a government becomes less powerful, then corporations will take the power the government isn't claiming. It's more of an either-or thing--either you give the government some particular power, or corporations will effectively, sometimes subtly, weild the same power.
And that's *besides* considerations of direct corporate influence on government.
Cynically, it seems there's a bait-and-switch going on here: the Libertarian assails government but assumes that the "minimal" government necessary to enforce the rules in a Libertarian society is above reproach. What you're doing is noting the inconsistency here.
I do like this post, am not sure it actually answers Henley's points, and think the question of whether or not Democrats share major policy goals with libertarians (at least libertarians who are somewhat philosophically oriented and the sort who spend a lot of their time thinking about politics and current events) is a mistake in general. Such people are either going to vote for Democrats at the current point in history, going to vote for a third party out of a desire for purity, or... I don't know, are lying about what they think. Other people who more shallowly self-describe as liberterians might be reachable by this method.
8: Many libertarians do that, the smarter one's just say, "No, no the minimal government will fuck a bunch of things up, just far less than existing government does."
5- well yes, obviously it's important that whatever the gov't does do, it does correct and non-corruptly. And of course no matter how small it is, it can be corrupt and oppressive. And will be to some extent. So again, transparency, accountability, and control are crucial.
But that's a separate question from whether or not this gov't thing that has the power to oppress (or prevent oppression) ought to be relatively larger or relatively smaller.
11: But it means that the libertarian argument that "It's not oppression by corporations, it's all government oppression, so the answer is to make government smaller" doesn't work; any existing government is going to be big enough to facilitate corporate oppression.
Henley did note the example of the incredible corportate-driven corruption surrounding the development of the American railroad system, but I think LB's Pinkerton example is a better one. I think, but IANAL[ibertarian], that when people talk about restrictions on government power restricting corporate power they're thinking more of things like the slow creep of eminent domain, but yeah, not a lot of help when you're a UMW guy getting your ribs staved in by the American Legion. That said, I believe the framework you're talking about is "minarchism" and other flavors of libertarianism may have answers for what you do when the Night Watchman ran over your dog. (Science fiction, the realm where libertarianism works™, has posited private police forces, of course.)
Have you shot this to Henley? He sounded a little frustrated in comments that people got hung up on the Western Democrat/libertarian Democrat/Kos Democrat question without addressing
...without addressing the gov't power/corporate power question.
I don't want a government small enough for WalMart to strangle me in a bathtub.
9: Good point. Looking back at the Henley essay, I was thinking about the quotation from the Caltarchy guy he included, and to which he was half-responding. I think Henley actually gestures at LB's response. But he still believes that smaller govt. means less coercion by corporations, though I'm not sure why.
I haven't mentioned this to Henley -- I'll go do that.
I'll defend the libertarian point here, I suppose.
I don't think (non-idiotic) libertarians would say that minimizing the power of government is the end of the conversation vis a vis good governance. So, your point that:
we can work toward having a government that is under the control of the people it serves and protects them from private oppression rather than serving the private oppressors.
is relatively uncontroversial. The libertarian idea is that minimizing the power of government limits the number of areas in which we have to fight the battle you describe. A large regulatory state creates numerous junctures at which clever and unscrupulous ne’er-do-wells can co-opt the power of the state in service of their own ends.
So, for example, if we grant the state the power of eminent domain, then we have to spend time and political capital answering your “questions about transparency, accountability, and control” with respect to eminent domain. Add enough such powers, and soon enough the forces of good are unable to cover all the bases and corruption creeps in.
I’m not sure this argument obtains, but the debate is not quite as cut and dried as presented in the original post.
12- yes, of course any existing government is going to be big enough to facilitate corporate oppression. I guess what I'm saying is that of course libertarians want to make the government better, they just want it to be smaller and better (and think the two are in some ways related -- transparency and accountability become more difficult with a larger machine). You seem to think that these are mutually exclusive ideas, for reasons I'm unsure of -- that making the government smaller means letting it become wholly corrupt, or something.
What kept flashing through my mind while reading these various posts is that article on the diamond cartel somebody linked to in the "Entitlement" thread. By the time the cartel pipelines its products to the US, it doesn't appear to be so monopolistic to US regulators--except that a lot of the most horrific costs are borne by very poor people working under nasty conditions in other countries, where the governments don't work well enough to protect the workers. What is that line of Henley's? Hayek doesn't stop at the water's edge?
I'm saying is that of course libertarians want to make the government better, they just want it to be smaller and better (and think the two are in some ways related -- transparency and accountability become more difficult with a larger machine). You seem to think that these are mutually exclusive ideas, for reasons I'm unsure of -- that making the government smaller means letting it become wholly corrupt, or something.
I don't think they're mutually exclusive -- I just don't think they're related at all simply. The libertarian argument that a smaller, simpler government is less oppressive is, I think, without foundation.
This: "transparency and accountability become more difficult with a larger machine", is, I think, just wrong. Look at all of the corrupt privatization of government functions going on now. If all the work in Iraq were being done directly by the US government, money wouldn't simply be disappearing the way it is now; while things wouldn't be perfectly efficient, it would be more possible to figure out what was happening.
The workers had that sucker won, had the Pinkertons begging for mercy. Business is not that powerful, by itself. Will Andrew's and Henley's Libertarianism allow closed shops, sympathy strikes, and general strikes and stay out of the way in labor/management disputes? Give me that, and I have it all.
Okay, but I think 21 is making a different argument than did your post (and earlier comments).
Regardless, I repeat that IANAL, so I'm done defending.
"No, no the minimal government will fuck a bunch of things up, just far less than existing government does."
Yeah, it's just that while it's fucking up the precious little Night Watchmen State, it's also utterly failing to provide me with stuff like meat inspectors, the EPA, the Center for Disease Control and health insurance (oh wait - I don't get that under this government, either). And yeah, I know that the official libertarian response is to say "Well, the EPA isn't lookin' too good right now, is it!", but that's because it's run by dipshits who think there shouldn't be an EPA in the first place. My solution is to put Al Gore in the White House; the Libertarian solution, I guess, is to scrap the EPA and leave it up to enlightened self-interest, which has always worked out so well.
Debates like this seem incredibly frustrating to me, because (1) on a purely pragmatic level, so we really need to spend that much time winning over libertarians? The Jim Henleys of the world are already with us, and the Andrew Olmsteds will find one excuse after another to not fucking care, and in the end there probably aren't enough of them to matter anyway; (2) it's not like this is some purely theoretical discussion here. We had the 1890s and the glories of the untrammeled market, and we have places like Sweden. Are the Swedes really all that tyrannized by socialized medicine?
"We had the 1890s and the glories of the untrammeled market, "
Read a biography of carnegie and note how much of his wealth was made by bending the state to his will.
he 1890s and the glories of the untrammeled market
I hate to say this, because I am not with the libertarians here, but the 1890s were not the glories of the untrammeled market. The 1890s were the state-in-service-to-capital, under the cover of capital being pressed in service to the state. You had a protective tariff that gave advantages to manufacturing interests and a court system that interpreted the antitrust law to apply to unions, but not to corporations. (I exaggerate, but not much.) It's much more nearly mercantilist than it is the free market.
As I say, I hesitate to make this argument because it gets you closer to the whiniest position evar, which is "libertarianism would work; it's never been tried."
24: It's the Olmsteads. There are a lot of people out there who support their Republican voting habits by thinking that Republican pro-business/anti-individual policies are somehow related to freedom. I'm trying (ineffectively, but trying) to make that thought a harder one to have with a straight face.
25, 26: But that's the point -- that a small, simple government is still completely corruptible. The libertarian dream of a government too small to be harmful is nonsense; we tried that in the 1890s and it didn't work. Size doesn't enter into it.
25, 26: Sarcasm. The untrammeled market trammels (no, not a word) over everything else; that was my point.
LB- your example doen't hold water either. Iraq reconstruction is a huge undertaking, and there is no more guarantee of money not disappearing in the public sphere. Remember $500 toilet seats? But I do think on the larger issue that "smaller" government would be less intrusive on your daily life. Corporations are nothing more than ficticious persons. As a ficticious person, it never dies, and has the culmulative resources of all the individuals involved for good or ill. One of the primary responsibilities of government large or small is to protect the less powerful individual from undue influence of the more powerful. So as corporate power has grown, government power has grown not only as a check on corporate power, but also as a check on inividual's autonomy.
Or rather, it is a word, but the wrong word and I don't fucking care.
No! "Trammels" is a word! They're like fetters. Or nets. Or something constraining.
But the government of the 1890s was big, I'm tellin' ya! Big enough to spew millions of dollars in benefits at Union Army veterans, big enough to crush the union movement, big enough to knock of Spain and take its colonies. Big! And Powerful!
By libertarian standards, I'm sayin'. I'm sayin' that if you want to find a libertarian-type situation you have to go back to the 17th-century backwoods, if that would even do it for you.
What I'm saying is, you can make the argument you want to make but you can't make it using the U.S. in the 1890s. Maybe you could use the 17th-century backwoods. Or you could talk to Tim about how Deadwood was all about libertarian politics.
The fact that a small government is also corruptible does not show anything about the relatation between size and ease of corruptibility. Or rather, look how thoroughly the 1890's government had to be corrupted in order for bad actors to achieve their results--I mean, hell, Clevelend brought in the fucking army.
Now, you can just slip Ted Steven's aide an envelope full of cash and get great results.
The Libertarian Communist Library...from a link on the Wikipedia Anarcho-Syndicalist page.
The Triumph of Liberalism is the triumph of Capitalism, and Capital over Labor. It strikes me as kinda hilarious that a left-wing libertarianism is unimaginable anymore. Yeah, I'm laughing. On the one hand, liberals say gov't will always be corrupted by business interests, and on the other hand, that just means we need even more government. And of course, there is no contradiction. If I have an argument with Burke and Kaufman and Liberals, it is that worship process over outcomes, and worship gov'y for its own sake. They are utterly and completely co-opted.
Europe in part has a more generous welfare state because of Labor policy. Maggie Thatcher outlawed Sympathy strikes in 1980. Without gov't, in an industrial society, workers win.
I dunno LB, this argument seems to rest on an equivocal use of the concept of "power." In one sense, people use "power" to mean those actions a legitimate government is authorized to carry out, and in another sense they mean the coercive threat which underwrites those actions. A government whose constitution forbids it from quartering soldiers in your house and detaining you without trial is, in the former sense, a less powerful government that one that can legitimately do those things, even though both governments might have equal coercive force at their disposal.
look how thoroughly the 1890's government had to be corrupted in order for bad actors to achieve their results
Oh, lord, I can't stop: no, this isn't the point at all. The 1890s government was big and powerful precisely because of corruption; state power and corporate corruption really did, on almost any sober analysis, grow hand-in-hand.
This is a silly argument, though, because we shouldn't really care about the size of government per se; we should care about the character of its powers. The 1890s government had no power to relieve the conditions of what TR called "the crushable elements" and plenty for the crushers.
39: Sure. The libertarian argument, as I understand it, is in part that 'We can't trust contraints on government to use its regulatory powers only for good -- we have to reduce the actual amount of real-world power it has.' All I'm saying here is that there's no way to reduce the actual amount of real world power the government has to the point that it can't successfully oppress -- we have to count on transparency, and accountability, and those sorts of constraints.
we shouldn't really care about the size of government per se; we should care about the character of its powers.
Exactly -- this is what I'm trying to argue.
Look, ultimately this just gets back to the fact that liberalism is rooted more in pragmatism more than anything else, whereas conservatism and libertarianism are rooted in ideology. Libertarianism is concerned with making government smaller - sometimes nonexistent, sometimes as small as it possibly can. Liberalism doesn't really care what size government is; it doesn't want government to be bigger per se, it just want government to work, and to help produce the best possible society. One of these makes sense to me; the other one seems pretty damn arbitrary.
And also, what? B/ell/e -- of "and a pony" -- is a libertarian? Or was that a joke?
And can anyone show me a liberal who favors the increase of government power per se? I'm pretty sure I don't believe in such people.
All I'm saying here is that there's no way to reduce the actual amount of real world power the government has to the point that it can't successfully oppress
But aren't you saying that because you're using "real world power" in a different sense than the Libertarians are? I mean, in a sense it's tautological that a government has the power to oppress, that's what makes it a government, but don't we all also believe that it's possible to constrain the legitimate, lawful exercise of government power?
44: Libertarian-ish. I believe. In the very-much-not-a-Republican kind of way.
"All I'm saying here is that there's no way to reduce the actual amount of real world power the government has to the point that it can't successfully oppress -- we have to count on transparency, and accountability, and those sorts of constraints."
And the libertarian response is that it is easier to constrain a mouse than a lion. Fewer places where you you need to institute that control, and less room for entrenched interests to fight you.
Libertarian-ish
Well, heck, I'm probably "libertarian-ish." In the sense that I like my civil liberties, thank you, and would prefer not to have to get a building permit to wire a light-switch, and who among us really likes paying taxes? But I don't think those are meaningful senses.
I occasionally suggest that the Greens, the Libertarians, and the Democrats should join together and call themselves the Washington Generals / Hamilton Burger Coalition.
But of course, I'm wrong.
Time for my quarterly reminder that there is a long, developed tradition of left-libertarianism, also called Anarchism. All the freedom and insight, and none of the meanness.
it is easier to constrain a mouse than a lion
I feel as if I'm completely misapprehending the terms of discussion here, because it seems clear that while this is true in principle, this is not what you're ever going to get in fact; whittle away a governments' powers and the last powers to go will be the police power and the power to grant corporate charters -- i.e., the "lion" powers. While the first ones to go will be civil rights enforcement and social spending. Is there any libertarian that wants to deprive the government of its police powers first?
46: I don't think so. Go back to where the argument started with Kos (all arguments guaranteed caricatured, my apologies to those I misrepresent):
Kos: Libertarians! You're concerned with individual freedom! Come to the Democrats, because we're fighting not only government infringement on individual freedom, but also corporate infringement on individual freedom!
Libertarians: Nuh-uh. Corporations only infringe on personal freedom through the misuse of government power. If the government didn't have sufficient power to be misused, corporations couldn't oppress anyone. The answer is still to make government smaller and weaker.
Me: You can't make government small and weak enough that corporations won't be able to use its power to oppress people if they capture it. The size of the government is irrelevant; what matters are the controls on it.
none of the meanness
Well, except for the exploding variety of anarchist.
last powers to go will be the police power
But "police power" isn't an on/off thing, otherwise there wouldn't be any such thing as, say, fourth amendment jurisprudence.
And the libertarian response is that it is easier to constrain a mouse than a lion.
No, this doesn't work, because of this:
whittle away a governments' powers and the last powers to go will be the police power and the power to grant corporate charters -- i.e., the "lion" powers.
Slol is exactly right; the very powers that you can't take away from a government are the ones that enable it to do harm. There's no way to make a government incapable of doing harm, all you can do is make it well-controlled, and its complexity isn't terribly relevant to that.
fourth amendment jurisprudence
Which is why I say, if you count the Bill of Rights, I'm a libertarian. But I'm pretty sure that's not what we're talking about.
57: There's an easy term for that, and it's "civil libertarian."
Right. Fourth Amendment jurisprudence isn't about reducing government power in the sense of reducing its size or complexity, it's about controlling and regulating the power that the government has.
Ogged pretty much beat me to it, but if police powers are the only thing you have to constrain, you can use all your political capital to ensure that those are kept in check. Furthermore, police power isn't unitary--a lot of the question of whether you are dealing with a "mouse" or a "lion" government is the scope of police power, namely what is and isn't illegal.
Furthermore, police power isn't unitary--a lot of the question of whether you are dealing with a "mouse" or a "lion" government is the scope of police power, namely what is and isn't illegal.
But the question of the size of government is wholly unconnected to this.
namely what is and isn't illegal
Well, if you're worried about increasing illegality of everything, you shouldn't vote Republican either.
"Fourth Amendment jurisprudence isn't about reducing government power in the sense of reducing its size or complexity, it's about controlling and regulating the power that the government has."
This strikes me as exactly wrong. A government that can conduct random uncontrolled searches may not be "bigger" in some pseudo-physical sense. It may even be smaller because you don't need judges to sign off on the warrants! But it certainly is "bigger" in the way a libertarian (should) be trying to contrain
constrain, rather.
"Well, if you're worried about increasing illegality of everything, you shouldn't vote Republican either."
Hey, preach it brother.
But it certainly is "bigger" in the way a libertarian (should) be trying to contrain
Are you just using "bigger" to mean "more powerful"?
Yeah, I think there's a confusion of issues involved here; there's "big gummint" -- which is a big federal budget, and which people oppose when they feel they're being taxed -- and there's state power, which might not cost a lot, but which makes people chafe even in prospect of its exercise (see the comments on expatriation).
63: Again, that's the point I'm trying to make. Libertarians have a tendency to argue that simply allowing the government to take on more functions gives it more power to oppress -- that a government that provides universal health care has the capacity to be more oppressive than ont that does not, because it's 'bigger'.
A point I am trying to make is that this is nonsense - governments don't oppress by means of handing out medical care, they oppress by misuse of the police power. So long as a government has police powers, the measure of how 'oppressive' it can be is what it's permitted to do, rather than how 'big' it is.
governments don't oppress by means of handing out medical care
But the argument is that they do, because they have to tax us for it, and that's oppressive.
It's surely true that the corruption of government and size of government are not a priori correlated. And it is likewise true that a government that has only police power, yet is deeply corrupt, could do lots of bad and oppressive things.
The libertarian has additional points to make, however:
1. Stipulating a given level of corruption/oppression inherent in government, increasing the scope of government gives more opportunity for corruption to take place. If the only police power is arresting people for murder, yes, those guys can be corrupt and they may extort you. If in addition to this we add a power to levy import tariffs, then there's a new guy who can be corrupt, and who may extort you.
2. 'Small' government may lower the level of corruption by decreasing returns to corruption. Few people would spend time trying to lobby ('corrupt') the Sioux City Department of Motor Vehicles (budget $30,000). Many more people would try to lobby/corrupt the US department of Agriculture, which allocates billions in subsidies.
3. Limited government might reduce corruption because the major procedural breaks inherent in small 'l' liberalism can be better deployed over a small set of powers. Yes, one can bribe the police and get them to arrest your enemy. However, we have a extensive system to make this difficult to do -- you will also need to bribe a judge, the jury, etc. It is in principle possible for every action of the state that could harm or benefit someone to have the same level of procedural control as the police power. In practice, however, this rarely happens, because these procedural controls are burdensome and inefficient. One does not want to have a jury trial every time one decides to give a farm subsidy. Yet, farm subsidies offer an occasion for corruption. So, the more the state tries to do, the more likely it is that it will take on obligations where extensive corruption-fighting procedural controls are impractical.
4. Limited government may decrease corruption if limited is inversely correlated with confusing. If the government just does one relatively simple thing (arrest criminals) there is opportunity for corruption. If the govenrment does many complex things (set prices for foodstuffs, regulate the pharmaceutical industry, directly run the railroads) not only are there more opportunties for corruption, but the opportunities may be harder to detect. Shooting strikers: relatively easy to detect. Inefficient pharmaceutical regulation that implictly favors certain market participants: relatively harder to detect.
How about if we make our Unfogged service project electing LB President?
I think there's a lot of confusion here, in part because I'm not sure liberalism and libertarianism concieve of the world in sufficiently similar ways to respond to each other.
Also, I thing the Be/ll/e thing was a reference to recent post or comment by the same that she was, in some seriousness, considering becoming a libertarian as a consequence of the Torture Bill.
we have a extensive system to make this difficult to do -- you will also need to bribe a judge, the jury
That's so last week, baa.
66: Oh, I suppose I could just make all my comments 'what slol said.' But again, exactly. 'Big gummint' is not 'state power'. It is rational for libertarians to worry about the second for reasons of freedom, but not the first.
Evidence of Belle's libertarian tendencies. In this case, it's a Millian, On Liberty, don't restrict people's access to item of commerce x because they may well use it to hurt themselves kind of libertarianism.
Never mind. I should have waited for baa's post.
I think the answer to baa is that the sort of corruption you're postulating as being facilitated by a larger, more complex government, is in practice balanced out by the benefits to society from the regulation and government action possible in a larger, more complex government.
The argument that "In principle, government should be too small to oppress" fails, because a government too small to oppress is not a government. All you have left is an empirical claim -- that any given function of government introduces more possibility for waste and corruption than it does good. And, for any particular function, it's possible that that could be right, in which case get rid of it. But it's not obviously true a priori for any function, it has to be evaluated on a case-by-case basis. This leaves one with the liberal position that government should perform all and only those functions that it performs better than the private sector.
One thing that has not been mentioned is that when you use the word "liberal" as has been used in this thread- you imply a "classic" liberal, which has devolved into a libertarian, because a modern liberal is actually a progresive, who wishes to use the power of the state to achieve results deemed favorable to society by said progressive.
No, I really don't. Where I mean libertarian, I say libertarian. Where I mean liberal, a.k.a, middle-of-the-road Democrat, I say liberal.
I think the answer to baa is that the sort of corruption you're postulating as being facilitated by a larger, more complex government, is in practice balanced out by the benefits to society from the regulation and government action possible in a larger, more complex government.
That is absolutely the right response. And I should note that while I have libertarian sympathies, I'm not a libertarian. Nonetheless, it is eminently reasonable to believe that increasing the scope of government increases the likelihood of oppression and corruption, which is what I took you to be arguing against. Whether that increased risk of oppression and corruption is 'worth it' in a given instance is of course another matter.
We had a long discussion of the liberal/progressive issue not long ago.
76: As far as I can tell, libertarians are looking at one axis (size) and liberals are looking at another (character), and the question is how the two relate. I think baa's given an answer many libertarians might offer, whether or not it's compelling. But it's probably best to wait for Henley, as baa's not a libertarian.
Some of it is different ends, though, in that there are clearly outcomes that a good government might accomplish that libertarians would not want.
Nonetheless, it is eminently reasonable to believe that increasing the scope of government increases the likelihood of oppression and corruption, which is what I took you to be arguing against.
The thing is, oppression and corruption aren't the same thing. Increasing the size of government certainly increases the likelihood of corruption, but LB's point is that it doesn't similarly increase the likelihood of oppression.
77:"This leaves one with the liberal position that government should perform all and only those functions that it performs better than the private sector."
Really. I 'll be darned. I doubt any libertarian or conservative would disagree with that statement, which means it can't be a sufficient definition.
Sure looks reasonable, tho.
83: The difference lies in which functions one thinks those are.
Oh, absolutely. That's why I'm not a libertarian, the above nonewithstanding. It's just that the move you made in 78 is seperate from the argument in the original post.
From the perspective of a liberal, I think the practical consequence of the considerations baa lays out in 69 is that when weighing the advantages of sanctioning a given use of government power, our political discourse should have its thumb on the scales to account for the disadvantages inherent in any expansion of government power.
74: That's a pretty low bar for libertarianism. I want to legalize drugs and prostitution, but that in and of itself isn't a badge of libertarianism; within the context of the rest of my beliefs, that just moves me farther to the left along the "liberal" scale.
Increasing the size of government certainly increases the likelihood of corruption, but LB's point is that it doesn't similarly increase the likelihood of oppression.
But isn't the idea that the larger the monopoly, the larger the scope for oppressive behavior, the larger the oppression?
87: That does seem to be the idea, but whether it's true probably depends on how you define "oppressive behavior."
To pick out a point (and IANAL in the usual sense, either, so correct me if I'm wrong on this, LB or anyone): for decades, unions were prosecuted for engaging in conspiracy in restraint of trade; this same legal concept is used in anti-trust suits against monopolistic business practices, such as the forming of cartels. The non-crazed libertarian* response is, "That's proof that anti-trust is a bad idea; take that quiver out of the government's arsenal, and they wouldn't have been able to go after unions"; the liberal response is, "That's a bad idea, because using it to go after unions is a bad idea for reasons X and Y while using it to break up US Steel is a good idea for reasons A and B"; and the LizardBreath response is, "What a frigging shock that the government used a tool to try to clamp down on unions."
* The crazed libertarian, who works at the Mises Institute, figures out a way to justify leaving Rockefeller alone but hanging Samuel Gompers up by his toes, possibly after waterboarding.
83:The difference lies in which functions one thinks those are.
"This leaves one with the liberal position that government should perform all and only those functions that it performs better than the private sector." ...LB
After the empirical evidence is in, I don't see room for rational disagreement, under this definition.
And in any case, it is a pretty important part of liberalism that it be about how the decisions are made, process, not outcomes. Outcomes in this case being what is in the gov't portfolio and program, and what isn't.
I want to legalize drugs and prostitution
That doesn't make you a libertarian, just a dirty hippy.
What I mean is that a liberal, a libertarian and a conservative will define "performs better than the private sector" differently, because they have different standards.
And that's assuming everyone agrees on the empirical evidence, which is manifestly not the case.
Neither 92 or 93 give me a reason a conservative or libertarian could not find himself in that definition, ie, call himself a liberal.
He certainly could, and I didn't say he couldn't.
95:The it does not adequately describe the way liberals are different than the others, it does not distinguish.
It is nonetheless a principle held by liberals.
91: See, but that was my point.
I'm sayin' that if you want to find a libertarian-type situation you have to go back to the 17th-century backwoods, if that would even do it for you.
Well, this descendant of John Proctor wonders if you've ever heard of a little incident called 'The Salem Witch Trials'? Per teofilo's 82, it can sometimes be the case that the smallest governments are most oppressive. Whether you believe that's because they're more corruptible or more ideologically zealous (as respective readings of Salem would have it) is kinda immaterial once you're swinging from that gibbet.
How many here have read G. Gordon Liddy's autobiography "Will"? Apart from the part about self-mutiliation, the thing that grabbed me the most was his description of his FBI posting to Gary, IN, "a city that worked" (i.e. was utterly corrupt, and thus, very efficient.) I've become more sympathetic to that point of view after visiting New York -- how could you possibly hope to get everything inspected and permited and deeded there if not for the extra dollars greasing the wheels?
After the empirical evidence is in, I don't see room for rational disagreement, under this definition.
It's not rational disagreement we're talking about, to be perfectly frank.
OK. Whatever.
State police power not only provides property/capital power over labor, it also creates a dependency. Capital needs government. Social security and Medicare, for two examples, are ways of making workers dependent on government. Since workers are dependent on government, they will a) seek to make gov't more conservative, resistant to change, b) seek the protection of their entitlements and further benefits via the political process instead of private action.
But it will be one step rarified one step distant from personal association. A union member is more of a producer and agent for his pension than a voter is for her social security. And of course your representative must represent many interests, some opposing your own. Liberalism as process justifies and empowers itself by creating dependencies.
The redistribution programs may not be oppressive, but they are alienating and disempowering. Which was the argument for welfare reform. 50%+ of Americans don't vote, which I would guess is far a far lower turnout for ratification of union contracts.
100:Absolutely. LB's definition of liberal makes libertarians and conservatives insane, by definition.
I don't know where you're getting the idea that that's a definition. If it is one, it's surely of procedural liberalism (which libertarians and many conservatives subscribe to) rather than "ideological liberalism" or whatever.
LB's definition of liberal makes libertarians and conservatives insane, by definition.
And once again she's right.
103:Procedural liberalism? Why can't six scientists decide which functions gov't performs better?
76, not 77: "All you have left is an empirical claim -- that any given function of government introduces more possibility for waste and corruption than it does good. And, for any particular function, it's possible that that could be right, in which case get rid of it. But it's not obviously true a priori for any function, it has to be evaluated on a case-by-case basis. This leaves one with the liberal position that government should perform all and only those functions that it performs better than the private sector."
Now if "performs better" is a normative, value, or preference claim, rather than an empirical claim, then we have politics. But otherwise, we have science.
Why can't six scientists decide which functions gov't performs better?
How would they do this? Using what metrics?
Now if "performs better" is a normative, value, or preference claim,
Which it is.
rather than an empirical claim,
Which it isn't.
then we have politics.
Which we do.
106:Shoot, Teo
At which point I say private pensions are better than Social Security, and we have no argument? If it is not an empirical issue, what do we talk about?
How do you sell it to undecideds?
Okay, fine, some issues can be quantified (but it's not easy). But suppose a conservative says "I think the government is better at enforcing prayer in schools than the free market would be, so let's mandate prayer in schools." Is he empirically wrong?
108:No. Which is why most definitions of liberalism are along the lines of:
"The size and scope of gov't is what the people want it to be, given a fair process of determining that, regardless of efficiency."
Now, to be honest, any restrictions on that fall into what belongs to libertarianism (individual liberty) or conservatism (tradition and incremental change).
There are several ways to measure "better". Around the time of the last election--before the bloom fell off the moral values rose--there were people saying that liberals, who define better in terms of efficiency, fairness, &c., will never be able to talk to conservatives, who define better in terms of things like preserving traditional family structure, institutions, and forms of authority. Or something.
I've only read half of this thread, but I have to say I'm a lot more worried about big corporations than big government. Without government, what keeps Microsoft, for example, from controlling every aspect of its employees' lives? Practically, one does not have free speech in a corporate office. Without government, why would corporations permit their employees any but the most inconsequential freedoms? I've been thinking lately of the corporate heirarchy as the breeding-ground of the authoritarian mentality in Americans of all classes, but i just can't type any more right now because I slammed my finger in a car door and am typing 1-handed. Ow!
101 Social security and Medicare, for two examples, are ways of making workers dependent on government.
And private pensions aren't ways of making workers dependent on their employers how?
At which point I say private pensions are better than Social Security, and we have no argument? If it is not an empirical issue, what do we talk about?
If the merits of private pensions over Social Security is, as you seem to be insisting, an empirical issue, then what metrics are you using, and what empirical evidence are you offering?
1) That depends on the negotiated contract, how much of each paycheck (possibly matched) is invested, where and how it is invested, whether ir is a corporate asset, whether employees have first claim in bankruptcy divestiture, etc. They are usually less dependent for their pensions than they are for their paychecks. There are also Federal Pension Guarantees that enable corporate shenagans and gambling.
2) There was a not a question of metrics, but a meta-question about arguments.
3) But. I do not trust the guv't. The idea of Social Security is to spread the burden as wide as possible, and so protect it. But the set of voters has a much wider spread of interests than the set of workers, and many younger professionals or the self-employed are not necessarily going to vote to increase their taxes in order to pay for my old age. In fact, by assisting in moving manufacturing overseas, that group of voters willing to support entitlements can be deliberately decreased in size and power.
Do I trust this one-Party gov't now in power to protect my retirement? Do I think it is certain to be overthrown before my lifetime investment and trust is betrayed? Fuck no. Does that mean I support the various privatization schemes? No.
This isn't complicated. Will gov't protect choice, voting rights, affirmative action, entitlements, any liberal programs or achievements? Can I trust the process? I look at America in 2006 and I not reassured. Things change.
And I am still in the very beginning of my Epic Debsian Anarcho-Syndicalist plan that will Save the World like a stroke of lightning.
But cities enacting their own minimum wage laws, forcing local businesses to offer health plans;California enacting separate fuel stds and essentially joining Kyoto...are clues.
Boston should never depend on Mississippi.
It appears federalism is the first step toward anarchism.
a little incident called 'The Salem Witch Trials'?
Salem was not the backwoods.
Salem Village most certainly was the backwoods by any reasonable definition.
re: 115
Well, a lot of leftists of all stripes -- left-libertarians, council communists, mutualists, various common-or-garden liberals, etc. -- are down with the idea of devolving as much power as possible to the local level precisely for that reason. Extreme federalism as the enabling factor for a less centralised, more responsive, more democratic government.
Sorry, not time to read the whole thread. Your post reminds me of Mancur Olson's roving bands of theives:
Through history, Olson observes, it has been better to live under political tyranny than to be subject to the depredations of roving bands of warrior-thieves.
I've been meaning to look at his last book about this, Power and Prosperity, because his others are quite interesting.
Oops, here's the citation for that last quote.
Here's the thing: if we're going to insert a bunch of economic theory into this discussion, then someone answer me this: How do the soi-disant libertarians (i.e. narcissistic propertarians) justify their actions along the axis of self-interest? Because it seems to me that if you're, say, a systems analyst for a big HMO, or you're self-employed as a house inspector, or whatever it is these "libertarians" do to earn their daily crust, then voting Republican is just shooting yourself in the foot. They come onto the internet and whine about how "the government penalizes success" (funny how you never hear Gates or Buffett making that claim, huh?) or how "Democrats just want to tax us into penury" (actually, I'm not sure they know what 'penury' is) or they make other claims that are obviously false. Almost all the "libertarians" that I've run across on the internet and in person (JMPP, are you out there?) have a very high regard for their own intelligence, and yet they buy into this anti-tax rhetoric wholeheartedly, although it's been proven to be lies over and over again. Very few of them seem to be any higher on the socio-economic scale than the lower echelons of the upper-middle class, yet they consistently support a political tendency that has made its express goal the enrichment of the very wealthiest people at the expense of everyone else. Libertarians are not posessed of "enlightened self-interest", they're just people who like to fool themselves into thinking they're "quality."
The way I see it, a libertarian isn't with the Republicans or the Democrats for any terribly good ideological reason. Both parties aren't interested in limiting governmental power, but the Republican limits (lowering taxes on the upper brackets, torturing foreigners) aren't as likely to affect the lives of the typical white libertarian male who pulled himself up by his very own bootstraps that his parents bought, whereas universal health care might mean his taxes go up.
I strongly suspect quite a lot of self-identified libertarians mean 'going to vote Republican, but not religious.'
Also, I'm not quite getting the corruption argument. Certainly, the existence of the FDA provides ample opportunities for corrupt pharmaceutical companies to bribe the FDA. But do we really think that we're better off with no oversight at all? Let the market sort it out? I'm sure no one will buy thalidomide more than once!
I don't think, explicitly, they do justify their actions as being in their own self-interest. People making libertarian arguments tend to frame them in terms of principle -- that 'bigger government' violates the rights of the governed, regardless of whether the governed are better or worse off.
And I think that addresses what McManus was saying about my comment in 76, that "This leaves one with the liberal position that government should perform all and only those functions that it performs better than the private sector." While mostly I was just being a smartass, there are some libertarians who object to things like universal health care on the basis of principle -- that it's an infringement on people's freedom -- regardless of whether it would be better and cheaper than our current horror of a system. I think those arguments are wrong, but they're arguments from moral principle, not from self-interest.
Extreme federalism as the enabling factor for a less centralised, more responsive, more democratic government.
Increasingly, this is my position.
Except that that's dangerous in the US, because state governements are still too big to be responsive in the fashion that a really local government can be. I can see the argument for devolving power to localities, but I don't think it works for devolving power to the states.
Baby steps. It could also have some truly tragic results: it would put subpopulations of various state at greater risk of being treated badly. We might not be throwing them under the bus, but we'd be pushing them into the street. My motivation isn't particularly idealistic; my distrust of the broad parts of the American population has grown to such an extent that I want a defensive strategy rather than an offensive one.
123: I can frame an argument in terms of principle without that lining up with my actual practice, and I think it's a stretch to see welfare as an infringement of freedoms but that habeas corpus was just something that lets terrorists win.
Also, I think part of the problem with trying to sell liberalism to libertarians is that corporations are made up of people. People, in fact, that did what the libertarian is trying to do/wanted to do/could have done.
re: 125
Well, I can't speak specifically to the US situation, but from my own point of view, I'd like to see massively devolved government. Not to entities the size of a US state -- which are, after all the size of many European nations -- but more to the level of the county or the city-state. Perhaps with some functions that are best served by big-government retained at national level, but perhaps not.
LB's point in 125 is well worth remembering. It wasn't that long ago that the question of who gets to vote was almost completely left to state governments. And for my tastes, states still have to much power over the franchise.
Cala, the question as I originally understood it was: “why do libertarians believe increasing the size and scope of government increases the likelihood of corruption and oppression?” To that question libertarians have many, many good answers, some of which I tried to outline above. Of course, even if we grant this point to libertarians, this does not imply that increasing the scope and size of government in case X is, all things considered, a bad idea.
As to why libertarians believe the things they do. Usually, it is a mixture of normative claims (government coercion should be minimized, e.g.) with empirical claims about how reducing the role of government will lead to greater prosperity (cheaper, more efficient provision of services, e.g.).
Last, I just wanted to touch on the idea that American left-liberalism just is equivalent to pragmatism about the role of government. I understand the appeal of being pragmatic, but that doesn’t seem right. First, as a couple of people have noted, it’s too broad. Almost everyone can sign on to the idea that government should only do what it does best. Second, it seems to give short shrift to normative claims that distinguish liberalism. For example, liberals (and libertarians) don’t think the state should try to regulate private sexual behavior. I can’t imagine what ‘results’ would ever make a liberal or libertarian think government regulation in this area was a good idea. Normative claims like that are (for me) one of the appeals of liberalism/libertarianism - even if some government policies would produce good results, that’s not the role we want government to have in our lives.
128: There's an argument for that -- it's just going to be difficult to frame effectively in the US, because 'federalism' here is so strongly associated with state-level federalism. Which, despite the fact that it's a primary part of the Constitution, is stupid, useless, and annoying.
Last, I just wanted to touch on the idea that American left-liberalism just is equivalent to pragmatism about the role of government.
I think this idea is primarily a function of the sense that we don't have an idea of natural law in which everything is immutably rooted. We're against the state regulating private sexual behavior now; I don't think there's any guarantee that we would always be against it.
For example, liberals (and libertarians) don’t think the state should try to regulate private sexual behavior. I can’t imagine what ‘results’ would ever make a liberal or libertarian think government regulation in this area was a good idea.
Child molestation, or sexual contact with minors (to rip an issue from the headlines)? Laws regulating adult sexual contact with children are supported by liberals because the ill effects of allowing free choice to people who want to have sex with 12 year olds outweigh the gain in additional freedom that comes from not regulating such private sexual matters.
The maxim I'm thinking of here is 'Your right to swing your fist ends at my nose.' Civil libertarian liberals think, as a matter of principle, that fist-swinging shouldn't be unnecessarily regulated. Where exactly my nose begins, making regulation necessary and appropriate, is a pragmatic matter.
Further to 130: “why do libertarians believe increasing the size and scope of government increases the likelihood of corruption and oppression?” To that question libertarians have many, many good answers, some of which I tried to outline above.
As David Weman pointed out in a post I linked in an update, aren't those arguments fairly conclusively falsified by comparisons of real-world 'big' governments, like Norway's, to real-world 'small' governments, like Nigeria's?
134: I think you're overstating it with "fairly conclusively." You might be right, but the libertarians are going to have a series of relatively reasonable explanations for why your analysis is wrong.
Okay, but unless those explanations are accompanied by examples of real world 'small' governments that are less oppressive and corrupt than real-world 'big' governments, I don't know that they're going to be all that convincing.
As a general rule, when evaluating something with as many moving parts and ends as "good government," I don't think indisputable evidence is what does the real convincing. I didn't read Kos's article, but I think the idea behind it is a good one. He wants to make the Democratic Party seem comfortable to libertarians by reaching out to them; it's a good idea, because if you're a libertarian rather than a propertarian, it should be less uncomfortable than the Republican Party.
The Nigeria/Norway quip seems to me like an early winner in the "most confounded cross-national comparison" sweepstakes. Is the new Weman-approved position *really* that giving the government more powers doesn't make it more dangerous, or increase the opportunity for corruption? That seems weird! Do we hold this position about any other institution in the world?
The Nigeria/Norway quip seems to me like an early winner in the "most confounded cross-national comparison" sweepstakes.
The thing is, though, if the effect you suggest as obvious (A bigger government will naturally be more oppressive and corrupt) were a real one, you'd be able to show some sort of consistent pattern with real world examples. I'm not suggesting that the reverse (A bigger government is always going to be less oppressive and corrupt) is true, but it's easy to come up with supporting examples in that direction, 'weird' though the thought may be. Supporting your thesis? Not so much.
you'd be able to show some sort of consistent pattern with real world examples.
The standard examples--the Communist states--have withered away.
The Communist states aren't necessarily good examples either since the degree to which they were truly oppressive and/or corrupt varied quite a bit from state to state in ways that don't correlate with the 'size' of the state.
The charming Austrian-American economist Leopold Kohr had a theory, or more like a bias, in favor of small states. He was a major influence on E.F. Schumaker and the whole human scale movement. But he didn't mean small governments for a given size of country, he meant small countries.
So now I am a bit confused as to how the discussion got here. LB originally put forth a position I took to be: "Libertarians incorrectly believe increasing the size and scope of government increases oppression. However, it seems that as long as the government has the police power, it can be oppressive." I think the second sentence is true, but doesn’t have much bearing on the first sentence. I'm not a libertarian, as it happens, but I know there are lots of reasons libertarians give for believing that increasing the size and scope of government power is likely to increase oppression and corruption. So I provided those reasons.
Response number one from LB was: "that doesn't mean increasing the scope and size of government isn't worth it." That’s true, and a good response to libertarians generally, but not directly relevant to the original point.
Response number two from LB was the Weman counterexample involving the comparison of ‘big government’ Norway with ‘small government’ Nigeria, a country which is also a) illiberal, b) recovering from a recent military kleptocracy, c) famously known for a private culture of scamming and con-artistry. That seems to me pretty feeble.
As it happens, I didn’t suggest the relationship between size and oppression was 'obvious.' Nor did I suggest that the relationship between scope of government power and government abuse is so strong as to overwhelm all and any other confounding factors. I don't believe these things. So maybe it will be quite difficult to find empirical comparisons that would be useful in either confirming or refuting the relationship in a compelling way. That doesn't mean the theoretical arguments aren't prima facie credible.
If one thinks theoretical arguments are basically worthless, and wants to leave off all deliberation until the empirical data come in, I suppose that's a position to take. Although again I would wonder if this is a position we would hold about any other theoretical claims about how institutions are likely to work. And if so, what is one actually asking libertarians to provide?
So maybe it will be quite difficult to find empirical comparisons that would be useful in either confirming or refuting the relationship in a compelling way.
If this is the case (in fact, I would say that the evidence leans strongly toward demonstrating that bigger governments tend to be less corrupt and characteristic of freer societies -- the confounding factors you mention are there, but they're there for an awful lot of 'small' governments. At some point, saying "Well, that small government is a bad example, because it's a kakistocracy," stops looking like confounding factors, and starts looking like evidence that the two things are related) then I would say that at least it demonstrates that any connection between increased 'size' of government and increased corruption or oppression is weak enough that confounding factors swamp it in practice. If what you're worried about is corruption and oppression, worrying about the size of government, rather than about controls on government power, is completely pointless in practice regardless of whether you have a theory that says it should matter.
I thought your original point was that size and scope of government shouldn't have any effect on oppression/corruption because government still has the police power. That claim seems ill-founded given a number of prima facie compelling reasons to think that there many mechanisms by which increasing the size and scope of government could increase the occassion for oppression and corruption. (including, I should add, a reason to think increased *scope* is likely to influence *control* because you can't run everything with the same level of control as the legal system).
Now, you may think those arguments aren't compelling. That would be dandy. But it doesn't seem right to conclude from the difficulty of proving the case emprically that the theoretical concerns are pointless. This just isn't the standard I use to evaluate any other institution. For example, I can't prove that having the CEO appoint the board of directors is a going to lead to egregious executive compensation. Maybe this study has been done, maybe it hasn't. But I don't need the study to know -- based on theoretical reasons -- that it sure seems like a big risk, and I would not want any company I depended on or invested in to follow this policy.
Maybe this study has been done, maybe it hasn't.
Such studies have been done and yes, they show a substantial effect.
But it doesn't seem right to conclude from the difficulty of proving the case emprically that the theoretical concerns are pointless.
Sure it does. If you do the study, and do it properly, and you are unable to find any effect such as would be predicted by your theory, that's evidence either that your theory is wrong, or that the effects of your theory are so weak as not to be a practical worry. Large effects are easy to measure -- an effect that's difficult to put your finger on is going to be a very small effect.
Negative results are real results.
Negative results are real results.
No kidding. But absence of results aren't negative results. And the difficulty of performing a quality empirical study is just not evidence that there's no effect, or even that there's a small effect. It can be evidence that that the area is filled with lots of confounds, or it is difficult to adequately control a study, or lots of othe reasons. Is your position that unless one can do a cross-country comparison analysis on the relationship between X and Y, and get meaningful results, we should conclude that X and Y aren't related? You really are an empiricist!
Also, on the CEO compensation, be honest, did you need the study? Before you looked to see if there was a study, did you think "that theoretical claim is pointless absent data?" Had you been unable to find a study, would you now say "there's nothing to say here, we can't make a conclusion about the advisability of captive boards? Because I think that's what your position implies.
No, I'm saying that the situation we're in with respect to a relationship between 'size' of government and corruption or oppression is not one where the data is absent. There's plenty of data, generally tending to show that countries with vigorous and well funded regulatory states tend to have low levels of corruption.
While there are many, many, possible confounding factors, the fact that the effects of those factors swamp any possible positive correlation between government size and increased corruption and oppression, to the point that it is completely undetectable, is positive evidence that such an effect is either absent, or small compared to that of the confounding factors. And therefore that it's not sensible to act on this theory as a primary means of analyzing corruption and oppression -- if those are really your concerns, you should focus on those confounding factors with larger effects.
Had you been unable to find a study, would you now say "there's nothing to say here, we can't make a conclusion about the advisability of captive boards? Because I think that's what your position implies.
Not at all -- I'm suggesting that we should not ignore data where it exists.
While there are many, many, possible confounding factors, the fact that the effects of those factors swamp any possible positive correlation between government size and increased corruption and oppression, to the point that it is completely undetectable, is positive evidence that such an effect is either absent, or small compared to that of the confounding factors.
I think people actually get PhDs stuying this sort of thing, and we're all talking with a complete absence of knowledge about the consensus opinion in whatever would be the field. If there is a consensus. My belief is that this is because our models are far too sucky to be useful posts around which to build a consensus. Can I see theoretical reasons for corruption growing with govt. (or any monopoly's) size and power? Yeah. Checks and balances, yada yada. But I agree with LB that it's not self-evidently true that corruption grows with size. But I'm also unsure what "size" means here, ultimately.
SCMT,
I don't think it's self-evidently true either, and I likewise think that defining state 'size' and 'scope' actually proves very difficult. I know I have been equivocating on these. But I think there are good reasons to think that increases in the scope of government (what it has rights to do) or the size of government (how rich it is, how economically consequential its rulings are) raise ligitimate concerns of abuse. If the Department of Agriculture acquired the power to set wages, I'd be worried. Who wouldn't be? Of course, it's also true that the US government is very far from being corrupt the way Nigeria is corrupt or oppressive the way Uzkbekistan is oppressive, and I don't want to endorse, even implictly, the kind of extreme slippery slope rhetoric that some libertarians use. I thought I was answering a moer limited question, which was "why do libertarians worry about the size and scope of government."
LB,
The originial argument you made is that as long a government has the police power, reducing the scope of government will have no effect on how oppressive it is. This seemed to me, despite the brief historical examples, a theoretical argument, not an empirical one. Also it seemed to me an incorrect theoretical argument for two reasons. First, because there are good reasons for believing that increasing the scope of government does increase the opportunities for opppression. I've given those, and you haven;t commented much on them. Second (and this is one I have not previously mentioned), because it seems to prove too much. If the government, endowed only with the police power can oppress just as easily as when in complete control of every level of society, then it seems that the government, with just the police power, can easily ignore any procedural/legal controls we put into place. But legal and procedural controls do, in general, limit the opportunity for oppression. Just so, I think limiting the the scope of government (those matters the government has a right to interfere with) limits the opportunity for oppression.
Now, it may be that what would really be useful is not to make theoretical arguments at all, but rather to do a bunch of cross-country (or cross-institution) regression analyses against 'oppression', and focus on those things that correlate. I think I am more skeptical than you about how valuable such an analysis is likely to be. I am also, I think, more leery that the invocation of counter examples is as decisive as you think it is. Yes, the Scandanavian countries all have a larger state share of GDP than the US, and are by no means oppressive. If you think this is a decisive point against libertarians, I suppose we can leave it there.
I have to say I'm a lot more worried about big corporations than big government
Why is the size of a corporation a problem, but the 'size' (budget, # of employees, etc) of govt supposedly a non-issue as far as fear of abuse of power? If I shouldn't care about the size of the budget as an indicator of govt power, why should I care about Exxon's revenues, as if only the second translates to power?
Although the anti-minarchists have a point, it's the "police power" that gives the worst abuses (I'd rather be extorted by a corrupt official to keep a business open than, say, be sent to Gitmo). However, there is a relationship between how many areas of life we let the govt put it's grubby mitts into, and how much deference it gets, and between how much deference it gets and how much abuse we get in return.
Govt needs more than power, it needs internalized belief, and a people who don't trust the govt to do more than arrest rapists and murderers are less likely to buy whatever BS arguement the govt gives for locking people up w/o trial.
We cannot trust the govt w/ the power the left wants to give it w/o giving them enough benefit of the doubt to let them get away w/ things like Gitmo. They are related by a common "trust the govt, because they are here to help us" mindset.
But legal and procedural controls do, in general, limit the opportunity for oppression.
Absolutely, and I am therefore all for legal and procedural controls on government and business, to reduce their opportunity for oppressing the individual. My point is that an ill-controlled 'small' government can be as oppressive, or more so, than any 'large' government. Measuring the size of government, in terms of the functions it is allowed to serve, has no empirical relationship to the freedom or lack thereof of the people governed.
I'll worry about government overreach and tyranny right along with a libertarian -- I've put a certain amount of effort into writing about it here. But adding additional functions to government (i.e., the provision of universal health insurance) hasn't necessarily got anything to do with increased likelihood of oppression, and the libertarian argument that it does is completely free of any empirical support.
And Scott?
We cannot trust the govt w/ the power the left wants to give it w/o giving them enough benefit of the doubt to let them get away w/ things like Gitmo. They are related by a common "trust the govt, because they are here to help us" mindset.
Nonsense. Again, look at Western European democracies, characterized generally by 'larger', more trusted governments than ours, and by protection of human rights as good or better than ours.
Govt needs more than power, it needs internalized belief, and a people who don't trust the govt to do more than arrest rapists and murderers are less likely to buy whatever BS arguement the govt gives for locking people up w/o trial.
Yeah, that totally explains the wholesale capitulation of Republicans--who still claim that libertarians are an important part of their voting block--to all attempts by the Administration to massively increase the size of its police power. That totally explains the capitulation of self-described libertarians such as Insty and Galt, who continue to fight against the tyrrany of regulation, to those same claims. Spare yourself the breath.
We cannot trust the govt w/ the power the left wants to give it w/o giving them enough benefit of the doubt to let them get away w/ things like Gitmo. They are related by a common "trust the govt, because they are here to help us" mindset.
Oh come on. Universal health care necessarily leads to Gitmo? Republicans have been fervently arguing against Gitmo, torture, and the suspension of habeas corpus while the left piously insists that we trust the government because it's all about terrorirsts?
OH MY GOD! Hide! It's pwndead!