Tuesday, May 29, 2018

Small government for the small folk

I asked previously whether "regular Americans" have any influence over the government. For those of us who think the answer is effectively "no", we may think of ourselves as "the small folk". My view is that the small folk amount to perhaps 3/4 of the population (others say 90%). This leads to the seemingly contradictory proposition that elections could be easily decided by the people who have no influence. However, this is not a contradiction, for a couple of reasons. First, part of what makes small folk "small" is that they do not have the resources to organize around myriad policy issues, and therefore they have no say as the elite micromanage policy decisions to their own benefit. Related to this, the small folk are not the people who run for office or decide who gets on the ballot -- so the conclusion that small folk could decide the election depends on someone actually running that small folk would want to vote for. Given these realities of political power, what is the best outcome that small folk like us can obtain from voting?

The first thing to recognize is that if the small folk are going to be anything but pawns in politics, we need to vote as a block. If we allow ourselves to be recruited to the campaigns of elite, their arsenal of marketing strategies will drag us into culture wars, special-interest favor seeking, or whatever pet cause they can use turn us against each other so that they continue milking us. To have any electoral power, the small folk must organize around a single issue, or a coherent and durable platform. This is the traditional strategy of socialist movements -- while it had some success prior to WWII, the elites have figured out how to neutralize it since then: paternalistic social welfare policies dampened the urgency of reform, pro-establishment worker organizations were cultivated to replace radical organizations, the threat of foreign tyrants was used to rally workers around the flag, and finally cultural disagreement was politicized (made into "a war") to create divisions among the people. The New Deal could be considered a victory for the worker's movement, but it did not change the basic power structure and class dynamic of American society, and eventually the USA fell back into the old patterns of elitist greed, unmediated by a sense of elite solidarity with the (white) working man.

I've found no proposals from conventional activists that would protect most Americans from being reduced to peasants at the mercy of the elite. Some progressives seek a reinstatement of the post-WWII social contract (with some updates), but this agenda has consistently failed to gain electoral traction. Even worse, it depends upon a sense of noblesse oblige from the elite, which is unlikely to be revived short of some crisis comparable to the threat of nationalist or communist revolutions*. Socialist radicals see an opportunity to revive their old big-government agenda, but struggle to overcome horrible legacy of state-socialism, ranging from economic stagnation in the West and India, to routine atrocities in the Stalinist regimes.

Any agenda that focuses on the state as a solution to our problems grinds to a halt when people balk at handing more authority to distant elites. The progressive agenda has failed to appeal to conservative populists, who see progressive policies as embodying an urban cosmopolitan culture that conflicts with their own judgement. Likewise, the socialist program fails to live up to its ideass due to the inevitable problems that arise when one group of people tries to impose decisions on another group. The political and organizational weakness of these statist approaches argues for an anti-state (i.e. libertarian) approach to establishing a shared political agenda for the small folk.

A libertarian approach first recognizes the limited ability of the small folk to control the state. If there is only one thing that we can tell the government to do, we should tell it not to take more authority on itself, because that authority will inevitably give more discretion to the elite at our expense. A libertarian approach also recognizes the diversity of the small folk. We are not going to agree on how to live our lives and organize our communities, so detailed prescriptions should be left out of a political platform to help us stay above the factionalism and culture-wars that the elite use to divide us. Progressives claim that the reduction of government is inherently elitist, but they ignore that even a small government must make many policy choices that can tilt society toward either an elitist or egalitarian outcome. An egalitarian libertarian coalition will focus on dismantling any government policy that gives one person power over another.

The details of this agenda remain to be worked out, but numerous ideas are circulating in the left-libertarian community, some of which I tried to document in a (incomplete) Left-Libertarian platform. Setting that aside for now, we can still discuss whether a "small government" strategy  is sufficient to promote the welfare of "the small folk".

Progressives and socialists make a strong case that many people need immediate, tangible economic support if they are going to get out of the poverty trap that the elites have pushed them into. They propose that healthcare and education should be provided as a right, and income should also be supported through a variety of interventions. I don't see this as essential to a broad-based radical movement, because fore a radical movement gained enough political power to guarantee those rights, it would have enough social and economic clout to provide decent social services on its own. Since that economic power would increase as egalitarian libertarians whittle away the privileges of the elite, those problems would be solved as quickly by a "small government" approach as by establishing new government programs. Perhaps the strength of the statist approach is that the agenda of the radicals could dovetail with the agenda of progressive reformers, such that basic anti-poverty benefits could be won even when the radical movement has moderate influence in society.

The egalitarian libertarian response should be to carefully avoid removing anti-poverty programs while aggressively targeting "pro-poverty" policies. For instance, taxes that affect the poor should be slashed, with the unapologetic reasoning that government benefits tend to be proportional to wealth.

Finally, there is one place where even "small government" advocates should support programs that superficially increase the size of government -- when the lack of  those programs is a way to push the cost of other government programs onto the poor. A prime example would be to fully fund defense lawyers for those accused of crimes. When the government decides to criminalize an activity (such as drug use), it needs to account for the full cost of that policy, including the cost of providing a fair trial.

*Trumpism could be a wake-up call to the cosmopolitan elite of US business school, but I've yet to see any evidence that their repulsion is sufficiently strong or widespread to provide a meaningful response to Trump's pitch.

No comments: