The real ideological divide in America

Shorn of all the political hype and misinformation, and the now largely meaningless Democrat vs Republican party identifications, the fundamental political split in the nation today is over what the proper role of the Federal government should be. It is not a new argument – the Founding Fathers argued about this endlessly.

On the one hand there is the group that thinks that the Federal government’s powers should be sharply limited only to (a) things that the separate states need to cooperate on – national defense, foreign policy, and regulating interstate commerce, and (b) the protection of civil rights, as defined in the Bill of Rights. All else ought to be left to the individual states and to private enterprise. This is actually what the majority of the Founding Fathers subscribed to, because they had just come from a European system in which they found the government oppressive.

On the other hand there is the group that subscribes to the European strong-government, strong- regulation model, and thinks the Federal government is the appropriate vehicle to address all sorts of social and economic issues. This view is generally associated with the political left (the Democrats), although in truth the conservatives (Republicans) have been more than willing to allow government expansion where it helped or subsidized their businesses.

And in fact the small, very limited Federal government that was appropriate to our nation when it was new and small would not be appropriate now that America is large, wealthy, and a major player in a much more complex world. The Constitution is indeed a remarkable document, but it would be amazing if it didn’t need a few adjustments over the centuries to adjust to new circumstances.

So the real issue is just what those adjustments should be, and just how big and intrusive should the Federal government be allowed to become. There is, of course, no simple, neat answer – it is a matter of balance and trade-offs.

Here are some things to consider in this discussion:

1) Government bureaucracies by their very nature grow ever larger and less efficient, arrogate to themselves ever more power, and as they get larger become less responsive and more impersonal in their dealings with the public. This is a natural consequence of their not operating in a competitive business environment, of having no competitive market pressures on them to be efficient or customer-focused. It’s not that the people who work in a bureaucracy are sinister; it’s simply that their incentives are not aligned with the needs of the public they serve.

2) Money, like power, corrupts. It is simply a feature of human nature. Large governments manage large amounts of money, and the temptation to divert a little of that to oneself or to one’s friends or business acquaintances (in return for future favors, of course) is apparently almost irresistible. And for politicians, the temptation to buy votes, and hence buy re-election with some of that taxpayer money is equally irresistible. It is no wonder we have so many scandals in Washington – actually the level of outright corruption (straight bribery) is remarkably restrained by the standards of much of the world. Washington has evolved a much more “genteel” form of corruption among politicians and senior government and military officials involving lucrative job offers after one leaves public service, in return for favorable business contracts and subsidies and friendly legislation. Look, for example, at the generous corn ethanol subsidies as a glaring example of vote buying with taxpayer money.

3) It was never the intention of the Founding Fathers that people would become “professional politicians” and make their living at it. In the early days of this nation, Federal political office was an unpaid public service that one performed for a limited time out of obligation, not as a permanent livelihood. Once it becomes a paying profession, the overriding incentive is to keep the job, not to do the job right. People bemoan the absence of “statesmen” in government today, but how can we get “statesmen” if politicians are more worried about their re-election chances than the nation’s good?

4) Some people would like to try the European model. Well, Europe has tried it now for a long time, and one can look at their experience to see if it would be better. By almost any measure – economic growth, productivity, prosperity, citizen happiness, rate of innovation, etc – Europe ranks behind America. The few places where Europe does better, like primary and secondary education, may be due to some anomalies in the American system (the resistance of strong teacher’s unions to change, for example).

5) Politicians have over the past 50 years put a lot of government-subsidized entitlement programs and a lot of special-interest subsidies in place, and quite naturally it will be very hard, and politically dangerous, to try to wean people and business off of these. What is needed (but probably won’t happen) is an adult debate in this nation about what government services we all think are worth paying for fully with our taxes, and what services we either don’t really want or think private enterprise could provide at lower cost and/or better quality.

My own view is that the Federal government does indeed have some important tasks that only it can do, and it ought to be structured to do them effectively and efficiently, which implies far more accountability than we have at present. A nation as large as ours does indeed need a strong Federal government for some essential tasks, but we are poorly organized politically for those tasks, and as a consequence are wasting a lot on money and building a massive debt with little to show for it.