This month we have guest columnist, Jeffrey A. Tucker. He is
associated with the Foundation for Economic Education and founder and
CEO of Liberty.me. He writes:
Freedom lovers everywhere are biting their nails during the
election season, wondering how the damage can be limited. Depending
on who gains control, we could have trade wars, nationalized health
care, the pillaging of Wall Street and Main Street, more wars in
the Middle East, a VAT tax, surveillance of your smartphone, mass
deportations, internment camps, and worse. Read that sentence slowly
in a deep voice and it sounds like the trailer to a dystopian film.
Another Way
Let’s take a step back and ask whether it has to be this way.
What if the power of government were so limited that it didn’t
matter who occupied the White House? Wouldn't that be a vast
improvement?
Let’s say that Rutherford B. Hayes, who was president from 1877
to 1881, had been revealed to be a fascist demagogue and bearded
would-be dictator. Maybe the same could be said of Presidents Chester
A. Arthur (1881-1885), James Garfield (1881), or Benjamin Harrison
(1889–1893). Let’s say they were all crazy authoritarians who
longed to rule the country as a private fiefdom. Would it really
matter? Probably not.
These were not the presidents who “made history,” and good for
them. Hardly anyone remembers them, which is to their credit. They
are usually listed among the “worst” presidents, which is to say
they didn’t cause giant upheavals. They inhabited the office at a
time when the private sector was growing at incredible rates while
the government was playing a relatively diminished role.
No Power, No Problem
As a result, they had no large bureaucracy to control. There was
no CIA, NSA, FBI, HUD, DHS, DOL, EPA, and so on. These agencies
didn’t exist, and their functions didn’t exist. The Supreme Court
didn’t do much. There was no IRS for the president to lean on to
persecute his enemies. Surveillance of the population wasn’t yet
possible. The government owned no weapons of mass destruction.
There was no central bank to bail out wars and welfare. In fact,
the federal government had to balance the budget year to year (as the
states still do) because the country was on a strict gold standard.
You couldn’t just print money without limit. If the money wasn’t
there, it had to be borrowed at market rates. The military was tiny.
There were virtually no migration controls, direct taxes, or
even passports.
There was no federal government involvement in education, health
care, or commerce generally. There was no antitrust regulation, no
social security tax, no regulation of consumer products, no
environmental land management, no price controls or labor laws to
stand between workers and employment, no drug war, no decades-long
process of pharmaceutical testing, no gun-free zones, no giant
military contacts, and no ability to tax earnings.
Most of the power that presidents had amounted to steering some
infrastructure contracts to their friends. And here, their corruption
was truly revealed, but the damage they could do was limited. Their
money came from a few small tariffs, and the tiny
federal budget reflected that. Presidents were managers of
a limited government that didn’t intrude into any intimate aspects
of life, much less on the whole population. The governments these men
headed had strict, meaningful, and practical limits on what
they could do. They had no policy plans to speak of, because policy
as we know it barely existed.
Leviathan as we know it had not been invented yet. That came
later, in the 20th century. Whatever great ambitions of Gilded
Age presidents, they couldn’t be realized through their official
capacity. Therefore, the stakes of any one election were extremely
low for the country at large. That's why these men’s names are
barely known. Even back then, hardly anyone paid attention to the
presidency as such. The president was a caretaker, holding an
honorary position, of interest to only those directly affected. As bad as the candidates are this year — as threatening as each
of them is to someone’s rights and liberties — none would pose a
threat if the power to act on ambition were still limited.
"Good Guys" in Office
Limited government means that, no matter how bad a person is who
holds office, he or she lacks the tools necessary to inflict
great damage on the population. Under a small government with limited and well-defined powers,
Americans are safer, not because a “good guy” won the
election, but because the institutions he or she controls cannot be
used as tools of oppression. This is what the old liberals meant when
they spoke of "a government of laws and not of men."
There is a sense, then, that when we talk about how grim the
policies of a Trump or Sanders or Rubio or Hillary or whomever
would be, we are not getting to the core of the problem. We should
not have to worry about the character or ambitions of the person we
elect. A good system of government is one that is protected against
control by wicked people. It should even be protected against good
people who want to use state power to realize noble ideals.
Government should be impervious to the personal zeal of its temporary
managers.
Under such a system, we would have fewer hysterics from both right
and left demanding that power be used for this group and against that
one. You can scream all you want, but it has no more effect than
yelling at the paint on the wall to change color. This is what it
means to live under rules rather than arbitrary dictates.
Mo' Power, Mo' Problems
Blaming those who are currently demanding crazy, scary,
destructive policies misses the deeper point. The real blame
should go to the generations who, over the course of a century,
overthrew a system of laissez-faire and replaced it with the planning
state, a central government with the power to run our lives, take our
income, redistribute wealth, manage the industrial sector, enter into
unlimited military conflicts, create financial bubbles, and bail out
cronies.
Power once created will be used. That the special interests and
then the masses clamor for it to be used on their behalf is the
inevitable result.
With power also comes a divided population, people seething with
hatred against those who stand in their way, interest groups consumed
by loathing for anyone with a chance of using power to their own
advantage.
The presence of power itself, not the people who seek to turn it
to their advantage, is the source of conflict. And such a conflict
threatens to destroy friendships and even the social fabric itself. Overweening government is the reason we all can’t get along.
Most of the people who created this mess are long dead, but they
still rule us. They bequeathed us a monster that the present
generation must contend with. There is really only one responsible
way forward: dismantle Leviathan before it destroys us.