Why I distrust big government

I was thinking about government today (well, actually stewing about how incompetent government has been, under either party, as far back as I can remember – to the Truman years). That led me to think that the reason I’m not a liberal, even though I agree with most liberal objectives, is because I lack the true liberal’s naïve faith in the power of government to solve social problems. It’s not that a wise and competent and far-seeing government probably couldn’t solve many social problems; it’s that I doubt the ability of any government to be wise and competent and far-seeing – and I would cite the evidence of all of world history to support that view.

In fact, in my experience all organizations of any significant size, government or private, are largely incompetent. There are lots of reasons for this, including but not limited to these two:

1. There really aren’t enough competent people to go around. It’s not a matter of intelligence or education. There are plenty of nuclear physicists, brain surgeons, and rocket scientists who, brilliant as they are in their own field, couldn’t run a successful grocery store, let alone an efficient and effective government agency. It takes a fairly rare mix of abilities to run an efficient organization – the ability to multi-task, the ability to keep the long-range strategic vision in mind even while dealing with the daily nitty-gritty, a deep understanding of how to handle people, the ability to balance priorities, a good understanding of risk, decisiveness tempered with caution, good political sense, good financial sense, a good base of ideals moderated by pragmatism, etc. etc. etc. My guess is that not one person in 1000, if that, has such a mix of skills.

2. People in any organization have differing agenda, and few of those agendas are wholly aligned with the supposed objective of the organization as a whole. People are maneuvering for power, for status, for higher pay and promotions, to work with or avoid working with other people in the organization, to avoid blame or garner credit, to make their own job easier, etc. etc. Promotion in organizations is often much more tied to how effective one is in office politics, rather than how competent one in is one’s job. And of course the Peter Principle applies – people get promoted up through the ranks until they reach the job they are not very good at, and then they stay there, so that over time the organization’s upper slots get filled with lots of people who have reached the level at which they don’t perform very well.

Now these apply equally to private and government organizations, but with one very significant difference. The difference is that in private organizations, if the organization is not competent enough to survive its competition in the marketplace, it goes out of business (unless an unwise government bails it out with taxpayer money!). So the really incompetent organizations get weeded out over time.

Not so with governments and government agencies. Individual elected members of the government may get turned out if they are incompetent enough (though even that is a hit and miss affair), but governments as a whole, and government agencies, tend to have an unlimited life, whether or not they are effective at achieving their supposed goals. There is no competitive market system to weed out the incompetents. Yes, power among elected officials does change hands between parties from time to time, but in fact the great mass of government, (99.99+% of our American government) is not elected, and is not subject to being turned out by voters. And the elected representatives have given themselves an enormous advantage (at taxpayer expense) over any rivals, with their large staffs, franking privileges, and free access to media. In the case of the House of Representatives, both parties have so gerrymandered their districts that few House elections these days are really seriously contested in any case. So all in all there are too few forces in play to weed out incompetence in government, which is why we see so much of it.

This is why I distrust big government, and why I can’t subscribe to the liberal’s faith in the power of government to solve difficult social problems.