Letters

From the March 1998 issue

(Page 4 of 5)

In "The Croly Ghost," Virginia Postrel says the popular libertarian slogan
"government doesn't work" is "not so good....It thereby jettisons the entire classical liberal tradition--which is very much supportive of `government' properly constrained--in favor of a vague anarchism." This is surprising, coming from someone who has written so many eloquent articles showing that voluntary exchange is far superior to government programs.

One need not be an anarchist (vague or otherwise) to recognize the obvious--that government doesn't work. It doesn't deliver the mail on time, keep the cities safe, or educate our children properly. Its War on Poverty and its War on Drugs are massive failures. Millions of Americans have lost faith in government precisely because governments everywhere have reached the inevitable stage where nothing about them works as promised.

When I appeared on hundreds of talk shows as the Libertarian Party's presidential candidate in 1996, often someone would say, "You exaggerate; many government programs work well." But when I asked for a single example, the answer almost always was a deafening silence.

Only two programs were ever offered as evidence of government efficiency. One was the interstate highway system, but no one could explain why a program to build highways inevitably wound up spending billions of our tax dollars on such things as a new Denver airport that no one in Denver wanted and an L.A. subway system that Californians consider a joke. Another person suggested the Weather Bureau--but he couldn't explain why TV and newspaper weathermen, relying on government forecasts, are the butt of so many jokes.

Why don't these and other programs work correctly? The answer is simple. Anytime you turn anything over to the government, you transform what was a commercial, medical, social, safety, financial, or military matter into a political issue--to be decided by politicians like Bill Clinton, Newt Gingrich, Teddy Kennedy, and Jesse Helms. And guess how they make their decisions?

Conservatives recognize that government is incapable of eliminating poverty, discrimination, smoking, drinking, and many other supposed ills. But when the target is crime, foreign dictators, pornography, drugs, abortion, cloning, or any other item on their menu, government is suddenly transformed into Superman. Just allocate enough money, and the problem will be solved. And if the problem isn't solved, that's proof that not enough money was spent. Transpose the menus and you get the definition of a liberal.

Libertarians, however, know that government doesn't work--even when it tries to do something we want. Government is coercion--pure and simple. Every government program involves forced activity, forcible prohibition, and/or forced financing--or else it wouldn't be a government program. And there's no way to make force efficient or benevolent; it's just force. Thus libertarians are continually looking for ways to take functions--any functions--away from government, because they want to reduce government force to the absolute minimum possible.

What is the absolute minimum possible? We might argue endlessly about that, but the question is really irrelevant. What's important today is that most people reading this magazine--and, in fact, most Americans--want much less government than they have now. Once we've harnessed that antigovernment sentiment and reduced government to a fraction of its present size, we can argue over how much further we should go.

But realize that, when that happens, the free market will give the best minds in the world an incentive to devise profitable methods (that we can't even imagine today) by which the free market can perform functions we might think now can be performed only by government. That isn't a "vague anarchism"; it's a reasonable belief that free human beings are much more creative, productive, and efficient than government.

In the meantime, we move in the wrong direction if we attribute to government an efficiency or benevolence it can't possibly possess. That's turning government into a Santa Claus--someone who will grant us our wishes if we're good little children and ask for the proper things. In short, it's a fantasy. No, Virginia, there is no Santa Claus. Government doesn't work.

Harry Browne
Franklin, TN

Virginia Postrel replies: Irfan Khawaja's thoughtful letter, while quite interesting, probably exaggerates the influence of Comte on Herbert Croly, a matter that is of some dispute among Croly scholars. It is the case that Croly's father, David Croly, was a devout Comtean, literally rearing his son in the "religion of humanity." Like many a young intellectual, however, young Herbert came under other influences when he went away to college, much to his father's chagrin, and he continued to absorb other philosophical ideas throughout his life. (The Promise of American Life is more Comtean than his later work.)

The lasting influence of Croly's work came, in fact, from the way it synthesized and popularized many different ideas that were in the air at the turn of the century. Self-sacrificing "altruism" was only one such idea. The notion that large, bureaucratic organizations are more efficient than "wasteful" competition--but, at the same time, are too dangerous to be left unregulated--was another, arguably far more influential, one. So was pragmatism, in both the philosophical and colloquial sense. And so, indeed, was Croly's depiction of the talented individual crushed by mass society--a vision only a few steps away from Rand's The Fountainhead. Reducing complex intellectual currents to a single explanatory variable, however powerful that variable may be, is a hazardous practice.

Harry Browne's letter is Exhibit A in the case for Crolyist influence. To say "government doesn't work" is not the same as to say we should have "much less government than we have now"--unless you buy Croly's definition of "government" as necessarily consisting of "programs" of regulation and redistribution, rather than as institutions enforcing neutral rules. To declare simplistically that "government doesn't work" is to say government in any form doesn't work. And that is exactly what Mr. Browne does say in the paragraph that begins, "`Libertarians, however, know that government doesn't work."

This argument, which Mr. Browne retracts in the final two paragraphs of his letter, runs completely counter to the classical-liberal tradition of limited government, as well as to the constitutionally established order that Mr. Browne has elsewhere said he supports. It is an argument for anarchy.

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