Liberty Seminar: Why Does Government Grow?

Last weekend tens of thousands of fired-up Americans gathered in Washington to protest the most rapid inflation of government since WWII. Meanwhile, in a hotel conference room in Old Town Alexandria, a group of journalists and academics wrestled with a related question: Why does government grow?

The discussions were sponsored by the Institute for Humane Studies at George Mason University in partnership with the Liberty Fund. Here are some questions and insights that emerged from the weekend.

• Nobody ever votes for "big government" per se.

• Many measurements of the size of government are unsatisfying. A nation that imposes military conscription and racial apartheid might be far more oppressive than a nation that spends a higher percentage of its GDP on government, but that imposes neither conscription nor apartheid.

• What makes an explanation for the growth of government more or less plausible?

• People often mistake the least unreasonable hypothesis for the one true cause.

• Explanations that account for an increase in the size of government might not account equally well for decreases in the size of government. A one-way ratchet may be at work, especially during crises in which people become accustomed to new levels of government intrusion. Once a crisis is over, new powers often are not repealed. (E.g.: A telephone excise tax imposed in 1898 to pay for the Spanish-American War was not repealed until 2006.)

• So why do countries with very different experiences with war end up in roughly the same place in terms of how much GDP their governments consume?

• TO WHAT extent does the growth of government merely supplant other forms of social control? For instance, are people more free in small, tight-knit communities where social norms about marriage and church attendance are extremely high, or in large cities with no such norms but stringent regulations and high taxes?

• It seems intuitively obvious that greater redistribution of wealth would occur in societies with high income inequality. In fact, greater redistribution actually occurs in societies where the range of income levels is already fairly egalitarian.

• Contrary to our intuition, government redistribution of wealth has an "arbitrary, rather an an egalitarian, impact on the distribution of income."

• Democratic societies often produce a redistributive churning that is congenial to no one, but they have no way out of the prisoner's dilemma that produced the result. (See: Jonathan Rauch's Demosclerosis.)

• REDISTRIBUTION OF wealth necessarily dictates reallocation of resources, says the Hungarian-born philosopher Anthony de Jasay: "If robbing Peter did not result in his consuming less champagne and fewer dancing girls, and paying Paul did not lead to his getting more health care and to his children staying longer at school, why did the social engineers bother at all? . . . The decision to let Paul get more and Peter less, is implicitly also a decision to allocate ex-dancing girls to teaching and nursing."

• In thinking about the question of how much government there should be, is it better to appeal to an exogenous standard of natural rights or merely to assign an equal value to each person's judgment and tally the votes?

• How much do institutional constraints on the size of government actually constrain it in practice? See: The Supreme Court's acquiescence to the internment of Japanese-Americans in WWII, or the now-seemingly-quaint notion that Congress lacks the power to do anything not explicitly enumeraged in Article I of the Constitution.

• The self-interested voter hypothesis -- people vote for their own perceived interests -- does not withstand close examination.

"The wealthy but uncharitable socialist . . . ceases to be a mystery once you understand relative prices," says GMU economist Brian Caplan: "Voluntary charity is costly to the giver, but voting for charity . . . is virtually free."

• Utopia is exciting to think about and plan for. Socialist Utopia defines a clear end-point. Does classical liberalism have trouble attracting adherents because the classical liberal utopia -- in which each person is free to pursue his own vision of happiness -- draws no clear picture of what the future should look like?

• It is important to distinguish between our preferences about (a) the rules of the game governing societal interactions and (b) the choices people make within the constraints of those rules. This is extraordinarily hard to do.

• Would changes in some rules be easier to implement if they included not sunset provisions, but sun-rise provisions -- i.e., provisions stipulating that they would not take effect for X number of years?

• BECAUSE VOTER preferences are not single-peaked, bundling rule changes or increasing the level of generality governing rule changes (e.g., moving from "should control over gay marriage devolve to the states?" to "should control over all contractual agreements devolve to the states?") might not alter the outcome of the vote.

• There may be many sets of rules that are Pareto-optimal (which is to say that no change in the rules could occur that would not make at least one individual worse off), so it might be impossible to attain unanimity about which set of rules is best.

• John Rawls' idea of the "veil of ignorance" might owe a lot to The Calculus of Consent, by James M. Buchanan and Gordon Tulloch.

And finally . . . .

• If an intellectual is, as Hayek -- that's Friedrich Hayek, not Salma Hayek -- defines one, a "second-hand dealer in ideas" who wields influence but lacks originality, then does that mean Glenn Beck qualifies as an intellectual?

If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we should find in each man's life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility.

--Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

Contact A. Barton Hinkle at (804) 649-6627 or .