One of the things that first drew me to conservatism and by extension libertarianism was the concept of limited government. Now, oftentimes people conflate the concept of limited government with small government. I don’t think the two are the same. And one of the things that’s pushed me away from both conservatism and ideological libertarianism (as opposed to the neoclassical liberalism that I’m working with these days) is that I don’t think many conservative policies lead to limited government (and libertarian policies often just serve to bolster conservative policies despite whatever good intentions). No, conservative politicking too often leads to small government in terms of size* but not limited government in terms of scope.
See, I’m all for big government. I’m perfectly comfortable with a very distributive tax system, with a very progressive tax code, with big government expenditures on things like high-speed rail and other infrastructure projects, with a robust private labor movement, etc. What worries me is not the size of government, the rate of taxation or any of that – indeed, I’ve argued before that for a free market society to truly function, for a liberal economy to be as liberal and free as possible, the state will need to provide a generous and constant welfare net. So sign me up for big government. If…
…we can also manage to limit the scope of said government. Scope is key, whether we’re talking about our bedrooms or our digital privacy or our ability to practice religion freely, build mosques, or say stupid hateful nonsense about other people. Let’s limit the ability of our government to create monopolies, to work in cahoots with big corporations to quash competition and hurt consumers. And let’s limit the power of the state to make war, to construct secret prisons, to torture our prisoners, to spy on or assassinate our own citizens. There’s plenty of evil a government can do whether it’s big or small. Limited government – as far as I’m concerned – has nothing to do with the size of the state, the tax rate, or the sorts of welfare programs we construct.
The point is we need a government that is not too top-down, not too much invested in our day to day lives, not too powerful or centralized – but rather a government that provides the support systems that keep people on their feet, keep kids from going hungry or people who lose their jobs from also losing their homes and healthcare, that helps enforce health and safety and environmental standards without placing undue burden on the working class.
If that’s all very meta, I apologize. I just read this passage from Kevin Drum and it got me thinking:
It’s useful to know where you can find political allies. If you can find liberals who favor charter schools, less regulation of small businesses, and an end to Fannie Mae, that’s well and good. But that’s 10% or less of my worldview. I also favor high marginal tax rates on the rich, national healthcare, full funding for Social Security, more spending on early childhood education, stiff regulations on the financial industry, robust environmental rules, a strong labor movement, a cap-and-trade regime to reduce carbon emissions, a major assault on income inequality, more and better public transit, and plenty of other lefty ambitions that I won’t bother to list. If we could do all that without a bigger state, that would be fine. But we can’t. When it’s all said and done, if we lived in Drum World I figure combined government expenditures would be 40-45% of GDP and the funding source for all that would be strongly progressive. “Statist” is an obviously provocative (and usually puerile) way to frame this, but really, it’s not all that far off the mark. It wouldn’t be tyranny, any more than Sweden is a tyranny, but it would certainly be a world in which the American state was quite a bit bigger than it is now.
Honestly, I’m not that opposed to anything Drum lists here, but there’s this nagging voice in the back of my mind that keeps saying – okay, in Sweden this might not be tyranny, but this is America we’re talking about. I know the politicians here. I know we can march off to war with Iraq unprovoked, can start a whole new culture war over whether drowning people in order to gain intelligence should be termed ‘torture’. Maybe we should strive to be more like Sweden, but we have a long ways to go before I trust our government to be both big and limited at the same time. Then again, I don’t trust it to be small and limited either.
* Though often as not we see contracted private services replace government functions rather than any real dismantling of the state. See Will Wilkinson on so-called privatized prisons for more on this. I think privatized prisons are a very bad idea by the way.
That's Master of Accountancy to You, Pal (JMN)
Incoming!
Zam
Despite what I have been told about your “conservative credential” I agree quite a bit with what you say. What I would like to hear you elaborate on is your position on labor unions. The general position I hear from conservatives is a strong anti-union response. However I have held the belief that we need workers to band together in groups such as unions to guarantee decent wages and benefits that come from better profits. My question is how do we get unions to better work with heads of the company to secure good wages and benefits without tying themselves to the security and benefits granted to them during times of expansion.
Villago Delenda Est
Glibertarians who scream “Statist” are also propertarians who need the state to keep the kids off their lawns.
NobodySpecial
Inneresting dilemma there, huh?
The problem here is, what does the government have to do to gain your trust?
Did you vote for George W. Bush? Did you vote for Barack Obama? These are men who do stupid things – because humans in general do stupid things. To argue that you can’t trust government to do anything because governments are made of humans leads to anarchy. (Which is a proud end result of actual Libertarianism, but that’s beside the point)
Government in and of itself is trust – you have to trust that the person who is put into office is worthy of that trust and will generally make good decisions and not bad ones. Now, if you want to argue that the way we form our government empowers people who routinely make more bad decisions that good ones, I’d have generally agreed with you on all the points you listed. But eventually the pendulum swings back, as it is now.
EDIT – and while I think of it, you might ask your more conservative friends how government can realistically get any smaller and still provide quality if the population it has to service keeps expanding.
IM
I could say a lot of bad things about neoliberals – a bunch of privatizers and deregulators ruling all western countries in the last twenty years with known negative results – but I want to be constructive.
1. What do you mean with limited? Could you define this term better?
Your examples I would subsume under rule of law (Rechtsstaat), separation of powers, checks and balances, tethering of executive decisions by laws, control of the executives by courts and the legislative. But that can’t be all.
2. The lure of Scandinavia – do you mean that as a third way of “flexisecurity” between the liberal model in UK and US and the continental security model in the Netherlands, France Germany etc. ?
(I am not sure that model exists. I think its proponents just wish away the similarities between scandinavia and continental europe.)
IM
And drop the word statist. A definition that has libertarians and anarchists on one side and all other political movements encompassing 99% of the population on the other side is worthless .
Yutsano
@IM: To be fair ED didn’t use that term himself. It was part of his quote from Kevin Drum. Your point is still valid you just need to nag the right individual.
ED:
If you can come up with a specific example where a private contractor has done the state’s business more efficiently for less money I’d like to hear it. And I can throw up a few counterexamples to argue that private contracting by its very definition should not do certain matters of governance. Going off your private prisons example, I can think specifically of private contractors running Medicaid in Pennsylvania and Nevada and computer systems in Indiana at huge cost overruns and large inefficiencies as examples there. Perhaps it’s a structural deficit of the specific contractors, but so far the track record isn’t positive.
duck-billed placelot
Thank you for moving towards accurate descriptions of your beliefs!
But – “conservative politicking … leads to small government in terms of size…” Did you forget the last decade? Or do you just not count the military as government?
IM
I was a bit general with the statist term, hanging it on innocent E. D. Kain. (On the other hand someone named Kain is always guilty). But it annoys me.
Size of government: As far as i now conservatives haven shrunk the size of government measured in gdp since Coolidge or so.
geg6
Well, I’m with Drum here. And I have no qualms about it. If the American public would actually act in an intelligent and thoughtful enough way so as to vote for politicians that actually professed such logical and progressive policies, we’d all be happier and live better, more productive lives. Unfortunately, the American public is filled with people who are too stupid, venal, lazy, and bigoted to actually vote for anyone who wants to actually make their lives better. How else do we account for the large segment of the population who gleefully vote for the oligarchy, screaming “FREEDOM, BITCHEZ!” all the way?
bago
I’ve. Always thought of the government as the provider of last resort. Private industry is failing to provide for your health care? We’ve got your back. Private industry is failing to provide for your daily transportation? We’ve got your back. Private industry is failing to provide security and fire mitigation, we’ve got your back.
Private industry is more than welcome to compete and lower costs in these areas, but as a country, we have standards. I’m an American, and I expect a baseline of social services. If you disagree, move to Somalia.
Xenos
@Zam:
You need a powerful state that can dictate who sits on corporate boards. Like in Germany, which obliges BMW to put union officials on its board of directors.
Like this guy. He is a metalworker by trade, and he is not just on the board, he is on the audit committee.
I am just trying to imagine the response of the US Chamber of Commerce if the Democrats tried to pass a law like that.
Xenos
And it takes a very strong state to make BMW put a union official on the Daimler-Benz Board of Directors.
Need Coffee.
Xboxershorts
You’ll never get to a form a rational/limited in scope government as long as the 5th estate (The media watchdog) is so completely concentrated is so few hands.
The rise to power of the neo-liberal/PNAC war mongers happened because they were able to control the message. And for decades that message was Democrats and Liberals are fools/evil/traitors.
After 3 decades of that message being repeated day after day after day on talk radio and by cable bloviators, a significant chunk of the electorate actually believes this with all their hearts.
This did not happen by accident either. The Koch brothers and the Scaife foundation have pumped billions of dollars into the message machine with the actual intent of demonizing exactly that which you and Kevin Drum describe above.
And because the left is now so demonized, efforts to shift the national discourse towards a state that serves it’s whole population are met with cries of communism/fascism/socialism and “I want my country back!”.
Absolutely nothing will change as long as these giant corporate interests are allowed to dominate and manipulate the markets they play in. Whether it be media, finance, insurance, energy, name it.
And there are a few important issues that must be addressed before this market manipulations can be changed.
Election integrity and transparency. (I HATE E-voting!)
Election finance
and
Return of and Enforcement of anti-trust regulations.
You’ve got a long way to go to earn my trust E.D. Becuause for decades, you and yours have been brainwashing my neighbors into thinking and believing that I’m some kind of fucking traitor and an evil marxist. And that shit pisses me off. You and yours need to work overtime to change that fucking message.
Starfish
@Xenos: That is amazing. It bothers me that the various boards of companies are filled with social peers of the CEO and do not actually do a lot. Or that is the sense I get from it all.
Xenos
@Starfish: They do plenty, like forming compensation committees that conclude that the underpreforming executives do really need to be paid tens of millions per year because of the terrible shortage of MBAs out there.
The point I was trying to make is that it is not just magic that makes unions in Germany or Japan willing to meet management half-way, accepting less pay in exchange for maintaining employment. There are governments that make sure management negotiates in good faith, and as a result the unions trust management, and can work with them.
Putting union officials on the audit committee is not the only way to do it, but it seems to work.
gnomedad
@NobodySpecial:
I’m pretty positive about E.D.’s presence here, but this is a key question. A “libertarian” who always votes for Republicans is a Republican, period.
chopper
@Yutsano:
i dunno if he was extolling the virtues of private contracting, given his example later of prisons. i think his general point there was that merely transferring the job to a private contractor and dumping tons of taxpayer money into said contractor isn’t really reducing the size of government. at least in that the spending is still there, although likely to be much higher with a contractor.
Nancy Irving
Liberals are just as anxious as conservatives to limit the power of the state. They just differ in the particulars of what is to be limited.
At this point though it doesn’t sound as if you even disagree with us on the particulars, E.D.
chopper
‘private contractors’, that is, the government dumping tax dollars into private companies to do the work instead of government workers, isn’t really ‘privatization’. many libertarians think that such a thing is the first step towards true privatization, but that’s like saying that leninism was a realistic first step towards ‘true marxism’.
Omnes Omnibus
@gnomedad: I believe he cover that in a previous post. Look back through the archives.
LGRooney
@NobodySpecial:
That’s the whole freaking point of America. You are not to trust your government. Government can not be trusted, ever, in any place.
That’s why political power was meant to be devolved to the extent possible to the most local possible authority, i.e., so you could have more control over its activities (obviously, the world has changed and local government proved in the end to be more tyrannical than our national one so we purposely swung the pendulum back).
That’s why the Constitution is a negative constitution limiting what the government can do in relation to anyone’s civil liberties (TJ: “it neither breaks my bones nor picks my pockets”).
That’s why they gave us the 9th Amendment – the single most overlooked piece of wording in our Bill of Rights and the single most profound – IMO.
That’s why the founders were so damnably adamant that the press must be free.
—
As far as references to Sweden go, never forget when we talk about those little slices of heaven that they are much more culturally, ethnically, linguistically, and politically homogeneous than us. This enables them (as well as the other Scandinavian states and Finland) to find common ground and a sense of community much more easily than we can. I don’t see those models as achievable in this country unless we break it up into 50+ smaller countries bound by some treaties.
E.D., remind me again why anyone would call you a conservative. A conservative liberal, perhaps, if we’re insisting on labels. You’re more of an old-time Republican than anything else which, given the swill that passes for political argument in the US, means a present-day Democrat.
LGRooney
@chopper: Amen! Stockholders are not the best stewards of taxpayer dollars.
Frank
I probably agree 100% with what you are saying. You are representing what I think should be the government’s role in society.
So why are you a conservative? I left the GOP because they have been hijacked by the religious (NOT Christian as these people have nothing to do with Christianity) zealots, and selfish people who seem to look at Somalia as some kind of Utopia with their lack of taxes/government.
debbie
I think Libertarians are pretty much greedy, selfish people in Republican clothing. They talk about smaller government, totally ignoring the concept of effective government.
Justin Coussoule is running for Congress in Ohio’s 8th district as a Libertarian. His solution to achieving smaller government is to privatize and outsource wherever possible. That’s not smaller government; that’s just running a shell game.
El Cid
Most of my life I have tried to think about what types of things might be best be done by our government and what not, but strangely I never felt like putting them into the categories of “big” or “small” or “limited”, and of course not any of this hallucinatory “statist” nonsense.
Linda Featheringill
Ahhhh. Something we can probably all agree on.
All governments should be limited in scope and power. So we have things like the Bill of Rights and a Constitution and Constitutional Amendments.
I know that the phrase “Big Brother” is thrown around pretty loosely these days but the government in the original story had very few [if any] limitations. It was frightening and nobody wants to live like that.
Everybody [left and right and center and TeaParty on the right and Anarchists on the left] wants government to have limitations on it.
Also, everyone wants rule of law. Nobody can conduct a more disciplined demonstration than the Anarchists. [The TeaParty guys need more discipline.] We need some limits on people, too.
Wouldn’t it be nice if we could build on that agreement and have nice discussions about specific powers and the lack thereof?
Linda Featheringill
@Frank:
” religious . . NOT Christian”
I agree with you. Some of these folks had better hope that Judgment Day is a myth.
Dave
As far as navel-gazing, “This I believe” hum-drum credos go, this was really interesting. I read almost half the words. Limited government vs. small government, now that’s one of the more intriguing things I will never think about. Can’t say for sure, but this is probably well-done, Kain.
k2
@bago: Excellent comment. Should serve as the Democratic Party platform.
k2
@Xboxershorts: Absolutely concur with your final remarks. I work with an all military/industrial outfit and I was ostracized for my disagreement with Bush, particularly Iraq. I am retired from the Army and honorably upheld my oath to defend the constitution. To be labeled unpatriotic drove me close to violent rage.
ErikaF
I rather like E.D.’s terminology, and propose using the term limited-scope government when discussing limited vs. small-size gov’t. It defines the problem so that we don’t get the “drown in the bathtub” image.
Robert Waldmann
I’d say that’s a very excellent post. I really think that the advocacy of big but limited government is exactly what Americans call “liberalism”. So I comment again that I think you are what we call a liberal.
I also like the argument that we can’t be Sweden and it is a bad idea to imagine that we can, because this creates the same dangers as utopianism. I’d say you are accusing Kevind Drum of being a nordtopian
http://rjwaldmann.blogspot.com/2008_04_01_archive.html .
Good point, but then you have a semi relapse. In most of the post, you argue that high taxes and a generous safety net don’t have anything in particular to do with intrusive government, then you suggest that following Drum’s nordtopian dream will lead to intrusive government, then back to square one.
I guess that you are unsure of the answer to a very difficult empirical question where there isn’t really enough evidence to be sure. But really, in the USA there is an almost perfect correlation between supporting a generous welfare state and defending civil liberties. How much stronger evidence could you imagine ?
Jim Pharo
I don’t really understand the small, nagging voice, let alone the idea that the government’s power should in some general and vague way be limited by some kind of general principle.
You want government out of your day-to-day life? Fine. No roads. Tainted foods. Gasoline that varies so much in quality that the car sometimes doesn’t run. No internet. No TV.
Honestly, why is there the notion in your brain that the “government” (which for conservatives means sometimes only the federal government, sometimes all government) is something other than yourself?
The core of this “limited government” nonsense is the false conceit that the government has landed here from another planet and is “our” enemy. If the problem is too many government hand-outs to business, or government in the back-pocket of Wall St., then the solution is not to weaken the government further.
It sounds to me like what you’d really like is a strong government, just one that is aiming at helping voters rather than donors. And I think that makes you…one of us.
terraformer
@geg6:
Well, I’d suggest that politicians that actually professed (and could deliver) on such logical and progressive policies would never see the light of day.
Established interests, I fear, are simply too ingrained and in control of who gets a microphone. No one gets within 1000 feet of Washington without prior approval of the oligarchs. I just don’t know if things will ever be any different, or if it can be different. The oligarchs control everything now.
superking
@LGRooney:
Exactly. E.D. is not a conservative. These are all liberal concerns.
JustBeingPedantic
E.D., I hate to break it to you, but you’re a liberal. Welcome to the team!
patrick II
I hate to tell you, but you’re a liberal. Liberals are all about government the right size to be effective while still protecting individual rights. You remind me of Steve Martin when he thought he was black and everyone else could see that he wasn’t.
DickSpudCouchPotatoDetective
That is just fucking amazing, Ed. Amazing that you wrote it. Amazing to think that someday, you may even write an explanation of what the hell it meant. Sometime after you figure that out yourself.
There are two kinds of government, Ed. Good government, and bad government. Good government is the kind that is appropriate to the need, economical in its execution, faithful to the interests of the people, and so forth. Bad government is the kind that slashes programs and resources for the wrong reasons, is aimed at pandering to public or other pressures which are not congruent with the true interests of the people, and which doesn’t do the job it is intended to do.
The latter is the kind of government we have been getting for the last 40 goddam years from people calling themselves conservatives. The former is the kind of government favored by people like me, progressives, who prefer imperfect attempts at good government to perfect experiments in bad government.
Once you learn to call things what they are, then maybe even you can understand things like this and write clearly about what you mean. I am ordering up some oxygen from the local medical gas supplier, so that I can hold my breath for a very long time.
les
Jebus, wasn’t your plea yesterday to get government out of regulating the economy? How the fuck do you think any of the above will happen–to say nothing of having a working/middle class that isn’t restricted to 10% of GDP/income/assets-without regulation of the economy? Keep the libertarian label–it’s the best approximation of a political/economic “philosophy” that is completely incoherent and has never worked, anywhere, ever.
Ioz , who’s a bright guy on the far other end of the spectrum, addresses this bullshit (using Yglesias as his pinata) more thoroughly than I can.
Hint: business sells tainted goods, fucks over labor, pursues monopoly, works in cahoots with other businesses to screw consumers for economic reasons.
EL
I’m on the other end, but would like to see “sane” conservatives again. So far, I’m following along, and it sounds eerily reasonable!
scarshapedstar
What if we declared a War on Conservatism?
Beulahmo
I agree with Kain and Drum about the government’s role, and I appreciate Kain’s ongoing clarifications on his positions. For a long time I’ve thought the big-vs-small government frame was ridiculously imprecise and frankly dangerous.
One thing in Drum’s quoted remarks bothers me, though, and I think it’s simply a matter of how the idea is worded. Drum says he wants to see, among the things he wants government to affect, “…a major assault on income inequality.” It’s true that we’ve seen the effect of increasing income inequality as a result of right-wing policies. But isn’t it more precise to criticize the *cause* of income inequality? Instead, wouldn’t it be better to say that government should support and protect opportunities for upward income mobility? As a matter of politicking, it seems like the results-oriented framing “income inequality” is, as Kevin believes, as “provocative” as using the word “statist,” no?
ksmiami
@Yutsano: Exactly! You mean like the quasi-regulators at Moody’s and Standard and Poor’s who were being paid by the same companies whose bonds and cdos they had to rank. Or the unaccountable boy soldiers at Blackwater…
Privatization of governmental functions leads to cronyism and corruption. See health insurance companies as exhibit A
LGRooney
@DickSpudCouchPotatoDetective: If I knew what you looked like, it would be much easier to visualize you floating around the room as a big blue-ish balloon.
mattt
A fine manifesto with not much I can disagree with……
Then EDK has to go blurp out the craptacular post on Cash for Clunkers which shows that when the rubber hits the road he’s really against any gov’t intervention in markets, and will misrepresent a program if necessary to support this position.
Stefan
As far as references to Sweden go, never forget when we talk about those little slices of heaven that they are much more culturally, ethnically, linguistically, and politically homogeneous than us. This enables them (as well as the other Scandinavian states and Finland) to find common ground and a sense of community much more easily than we can. I don’t see those models as achievable in this country unless we break it up into 50+ smaller countries bound by some treaties.
You know, people always say this, but it just ain’t always true. Look at our cousin Canada — it’s just about as culturally and ethnically heterogenous as we are, and what’s more it even has two official languages to our one. But somehow they manage to maintain a sense of sanity and proportion that we lack (exemplified by their national motto — while we have “Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” they have “Peace, order and good government”).
I’d argue that this is due to the divergent paths of our history and political culture (achieving independence by violent revolution rather than by a series of polite chats over tea, Canada’s lack of slavery and resultant virulent rascism, a parliamentary system which rewards compromise, etc.), but the point is that ethnic/cultural/linguistic etc. homogeneity itself is not a necessary component to “find common ground and a sense of community.”
Batocchio
Well, that’s easy – hire the Swedes to run everything, then. Or better yet, Norwegians. ;-)
Small versus large government is a false dichotomy, and you agree on that. It’s one thing to say that government should be a large as necessary but as small as possible. But, as Bill Scher puts it, the real issue is good government – it should be “representative, responsive and responsible.” Newt Gingrich and other career politicians – and many other movement conservatives and glibertarians – aren’t for that at all. They preach “small government” for personal advantage, political advantage or ideological zealotry, most of all to transfer even more money to the super-wealthy. It also results in what Rick Perlstein calls E. Coli conservatism. Gingrich, Boehner and the rest have no interest in running things competently, as 40 years of their policies and governance show, painfully. What you’re describing is classic liberalism, or perhaps Eisenhower conservatism within that. Sadly, it’s been dead for decades in the GOP, at least on the national level. (I wrote a long post on the social contract last month, actually.)
Michael Sullivan
“As far as references to Sweden go, never forget when we talk about those little slices of heaven that they are much more culturally, ethnically, linguistically, and politically homogeneous than us. This enables them (as well as the other Scandinavian states and Finland) to find common ground and a sense of community much more easily than we can.”
I hear this said enough, that I think it’s important to name what that really means. It sounds too pleasant the way you say it.
The reason a homogeneous culture makes it politically easier to “find common ground” is that the poisonous racists and xenophobes in your midst don’t have a large and visible bogeyman to demonize.
Those of us in less homogeneous cultures often can’t find common ground, because we still have a critical mass of outright racists with power who will push against anything that benefits the other, and a majority or near majority who is too privilege-blind to see when their buried prejudice buttons are getting pushed.