The Horrible Truth About Bad Government

Ross has an unnerving post up that I’ve been brooding over for a while. It finishes on this note:

in 2001, when Bush took office, discretionary domestic spending accounted for 3.1 percent of GDP, and in 2007 it accounted for … 3.3 percent of GDP. In the years between, it rose as high as 3.6 percent of GDP, which is on the high side by post-Reagan standards (we averaged 3.25 percent a year in the 1990s), but way lower than in the profligate, post-Great Society Seventies, when we were spending as much as 4.8 percent of GDP a year on domestic programs.

The bottom line: The Bush years haven’t been a small-government success story by any means, and fiscal conservatives have every right to be disappointed. But the road to serfdom this ain’t.

Now you can be in favor of the Iraq War and in favor of keeping seniors from dying in the streets and still be very unhappy about the vast amount of spending, foreign and domestic, that this administration has indulged in. Not because Spending is Bad in the Norquistian sense, but because such a gigantic amount of spending — whatever the GDP numbers — is, in absolute terms, sufficient to create corruption and inefficiency problems on a scale that ought to upset anyone troubled by the dangers and pathologies of centralized power. And so it has come to pass.

But one implication of Ross’s argument is that we can afford the inefficiencies — easily, in fact. Perhaps one of the greatest things about America — the sort of thing that both horrifies Europe and throws it in to fits of envy — is our ability to clumsily and gigantically squander: dollars, resources, calories. One of the direct consequences of the age of abundance is the luxury of bad government…which can, in turn, foster an abundance of imaginary deficit dollars to be spent on…increasing American abundance. One recoils at the incentive structure. But why?

Ross’s bottom line is that even the most spending-addled administration in memory — the one where everyone seems to agree that some huge chunk of Bush spending has been basically a total waste — has done almost nothing to deviate from the norm in terms of spending we can afford. This is heartening in one fashion. But it’s extremely disheartening in another, because it suggests that conservatives don’t have nearly as much of a case against big spending as they thought they did: i.e. nobody’s going to ‘bankrupt the treasury’, we aren’t headed off a cliff, etc., etc. In other words, irresponsibility in spending is no longer a winning argument — especially up against arguments like “freedom!” and “justice!” and “compassion!”

So what’s left in the conservative arsenal? I already mentioned corruption. But the liberal argument in modern times has always been that you should vote Left because those people care more, assumption being that caring corruption is impossible. (Wrong.) The conservative case against massive government spending in absolute terms has to turn at least partially on the idea that caring and compassionate people are just as likely, if not more so, to become as corrupt with power as not so caring or compassionate people.

I suspect that this argument can hold, but it’s not a very popular one, especially among people who are, or like to consider themselves to be, caring and compassionate enough to legitimately self-identify as such. But there’s an even deeper problem, which is that the meaning of corruption itself is problematized at the nexus of compassion and abundance. How can it count as corruption if our hearts are in the right place and we have enough money to ensure the spending to show for it? Every once in a while a Schroeder-like embarrassment might go down…but even those little episodes will be understood in the only motif available — as corruptions of compassion. (The concluding sentence of this piece speaks volumes.)

Without being able to argue successfully against the risks of corruption and inefficiency posed by big, bad government, conservatives would be left arguing against the risks that the luxury of corrupt compassionate abundance poses to itself: lovable, unaccountable profligacy might generate internal instabilities that could bring the whole thing crashing down. Ah, but we have experts for that. And our faith in our experts, such as it is, is really ensured by the basic problem that we have created a system which nonexperts cannot possibly regulate, or even hope to do so, with anywhere near the competence of even blatantly incompetent and corrupt experts, who maintain at least a dim grasp of the minimum functionality necessary to keeping the system-self-destruct risk at dismissable levels. And why are we nonexperts so noncompetent? We’re too busy doing what we’re already doing. We have no extra time. Our time is equally split between pursuing happiness and consuming happiness, with perhaps a few odd moments of every day spent simply reeling from the psychological costs of this exhausting yet addictive and often even rewarding routine. And besides, if we stopped producing and consuming at such energetic levels, where would we get our abundance? How could we afford the luxury of mass squandering with a smiley face?

These are the burning issues of today, my friends. Conservatives have little choice but to argue against the kind of government they despise by making a cultural, not political, argument: wouldn’t you like to get off the crazy train? But a lot of people like the crazy train, and many love it, and if the visceral appeals of faith, family, and land — to take three quick examples — have really been lost among large segments of the population, then this argument, too, may fail. Which leads to today’s big thought: there may be almost nothing conservatives can ‘do’ (in the instrumental sense of doing purposively in order to affect change) to prevent the institutionalization of the kind of government they despise aside from living the virtuous life as they understand it. This is difficult but not impossible, as it almost always is and has been in human history. Indeed, it’s still far easier than it’s been for most of human history — even with big, bad government. A truth, perhaps, not that horrible after all.