1Government Is the Problem, Not the Solution


The capitalist ideal is that government plays very little role in the economy—and the socialist ideal is that government plays the leading role in the economy. In that case, I say that capitalism is awesome, and socialism is terrible.

—Bryan Caplan

The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.

—Ronald Reagan

The Argument

The government is wasteful and inefficient. The private market can provide most services better because the profit motive makes it responsive to people’s demands. The government tends to ruin everything it meddles in, from public schools to Amtrak. We need to cut regulations, have the government do less, and let the market work.

The Response

I always find it funny that people can nod in agreement with Reagan’s dictum that nobody wants to hear “I’m from the government, and I’m here to help” and yet celebrate the valiant work of firefighters, police officers, and soldiers, who are all “from the government.” In fact, when you are in a burning building, your number-one desire is for someone from the government to come and help you. (The same goes if you get lost in a national park or out at sea.) There is certainly good reason to be skeptical of having a powerful, unaccountable state. But intelligent people should be able to distinguish among the functions of government rather than seeing “government” as a single entity. The War on Drugs is “government,” but so is Medicare and the sewer system and stop signs and the Forest Service and the Hoover Dam.

Here is National Review’s Jim Geraghty explaining what he sees as the core of the conservative critique of government. It is not, he says, out of an ideological hostility, but rather out of empirical observations:

A lot of progressives seem to think that conservatives distrust the government because of some esoteric philosophical theory, or because we had some weird dream involving Ayn Rand. In reality, it’s because we’ve been told to trust the government before—and we’ve gotten burned, time and time again. Government doesn’t louse up everything, but it sure louses up a lot of what it promises to deliver: from the Big Dig to Healthcare.gov; from letting veterans die waiting for health care to failing to prioritize the levees around New Orleans and funding other projects instead; from 9/11 to the failure to see the housing bubble that precipitated the Great Recession; from misconduct in the Secret Service to the IRS targeting conservative groups; from lavish conferences at the General Services Administration to the Solyndra grants; from the runaway costs of California’s high-speed-rail project to Operation Fast and Furious; from the OPM breach to giving Hezbollah a pass on trafficking cocaine.1

On the surface, Geraghty might appear to have compiled quite an indictment. But it’s not enough to produce a list of various things that the United States government has done wrong at various points. We have to ask questions like:

Are these incidents representative or aberrational? After all, a government with hundreds of agencies that does thousands of things is going to screw up. The screwups, when they happen, will be more attention-grabbing than the successes. It is not a news story when a government agency buys a bunch of reasonably priced office chairs, but it is a news story when an agency buys a bunch of absurdly overpriced office chairs. There is going to be a natural media bias toward reporting on the scandals of the government, because “Sewage System Functions Successfully for Yet Another Day” cannot be a news story. To evaluate “government” in general, we cannot simply pick a series of stories of sensational government failures (as Geraghty does) but must ask questions like: Do the scandalously lavish conferences of the General Services Administration mean that government workers generally operate in conditions of excessive luxury? Are they the exception or the rule?2Is this what “government is like” or just what your government has done? Much of the American conservative rhetoric about government can only be taken seriously because American conservatives don’t know very much about the workings of more successful governments around the world. It is remarkable just how many conservative arguments about “government” are derived from anecdotes about the failures of the United States government in particular, failures that are not necessarily shared globally. For instance, many conservatives say that the failures of American public schools relative to schools in other countries occur because our schools are run by the government rather than according to a free-market, “school choice” model.3 But this argument is irrational for a very obvious reason: many of the countries that are beating us have government-run schools that do a fantastic job. If the problem is that public schools are run by the government, then what explains the existence of excellent government-run schools elsewhere? Finland, for example, has one of the best education systems in the world and has all but abolished private schools.4 Or take Geraghty’s example of “the runaway costs of California’s high-speed-rail project.” It’s certainly the case that public rail projects in the United States have been infamously costly, and that Amtrak is infamously slow. But that is not an inherent feature of public rail. China, Japan, and France have highly efficient public high-speed rail services that have not been anything like the kind of boondoggle the United States is known for. The fact that we haven’t figured out how to run our public schools well does not reflect badly on “government” in general.5 It reflects badly on the United States.Are the examples failures that occurred because they were done by the government? If these examples are going to be used to critique government in general, then they have to be problems that wouldn’t have occurred in the private sector, or would have been much less likely to occur. When we go through what Geraghty has listed here, many of the examples are dubious. Take Solyndra. This was a solar panel company that received over $500 million in government loans but then went bankrupt. Conservatives pointed to Solyndra’s failure, and the large amount of money it cost the Department of Energy, as proof that the government shouldn’t be in the business of to “pick winners and losers” in the marketplace by extending loans. But a single failure does not prove that. In fact, the energy loan program ended up profitable on the whole, meaning it actually made money for the government, and it succeeded in its goal of helping renewable energy companies get access to necessary capital.6 Misconduct in the Secret Service and by the IRS are indeed problems. But any large institution, public or private, will have malfeasance. The Big Dig, which Geraghty cites as an example of government failure, had a great deal of graft and fraud—by the for-profit private contractors whom the government outsourced the work to!7 The argument the right would make is that “market incentives” discipline those in the private sector in a way they do not discipline those in the public sector. It’s not clear at all that this is true, however. In fact, because the private sector is shielded from accountability and transparency (it is, after all, private), it can be much harder to ferret out corporate crime than government crime.8 Government agencies have an inspector general, and inspector general reports are part of the reason that we know about misconduct in these agencies.Governments around the world do a great deal of vitally important work that is rarely appreciated. For all the talk of entrepreneurs being the great innovators, it is often state institutions that drive basic research into new technologies and medicines.9 Government failures are often visible, in part, because government handles so much that is important in our day-to-day lives, such as the collection of our garbage, the delivery of our mail, and the maintenance of our highways. Economist Rob Larson here explains the crucial role of government:

Tax collections aren’t mainly used to pay “the expenses of government,” but to supply “public goods”—services that tend to be drastically underproduced by markets because they benefit the broader society more than individuals. Things like roads, streetlights, bridges, sanitation systems, and scientific research are examples.… Likewise, services like education or immunization against diseases benefit everyone by yielding better educated societies that can produce more sophisticated goods and services, or a lower incidence of infectious diseases that benefits everyone in society.10

It is a common presumption that governments always do things less efficiently than the private sector. For instance, a CNBC investigation into the appalling state of American airports relative to other countries pinned the cause on government: U.S. airports, it said, suffer because they are run by local governments rather than by private companies.11 But the report’s reasoning was fallacious. Many of the examples it chose of the best airports around the world, such as the spectacular and luxurious Singapore Airport, were in fact owned and operated by governments. In fact, some of the best airlines in the world, such as Emirates, are state-owned. China, whose emergence from poverty is often credited to “market-friendly” policies, has over ten thousand state-run enterprises, among them some of the country’s largest and most profitable companies. Sometimes governments even take over troubled private-sector enterprises and turn them around.12 University of Cambridge economist Ha-Joon Chang shows in his book on global economic development, Bad Samaritans, that contrary to popular belief, heavy government involvement in setting industrial policy has been a critical ingredient in countries’ emergence from poverty.13

Milton Friedman once said that “the great achievements of civilization have not come from government bureaus. Einstein didn’t construct his theory under order from a bureaucrat.”14 But Friedman’s attempt to downplay public-sector successes was either ignorant or dishonest. Public universities, public highways, public libraries, sewer systems, the space program, the Hoover Dam—all achievements of “government bureaus.” Albert Einstein (a socialist, incidentally) was able to escape his job at the Swiss Patent Office because there were state-established universities where he could work.

Government institutions, when run well, can deliver efficient, cheap services to the public. In fact, the government can be more efficient than the private sector because its size means that it can reap huge “economies of scale.” For example, the British National Health Service (NHS)—which we will discuss more later—manages to deliver far more comprehensive and better healthcare to the country’s people than the American healthcare system, in part because having a single entity in charge of a sector rather than many overlapping institutions can streamline service delivery. This is partly why the NHS was able to deliver COVID-19 vaccines at a phenomenal pace; the government had the infrastructure in place to deliver a universal service quickly and effectively.15

Here is how conservative economist Thomas Sowell responds to the NHS example:

What earthly reason is there to believe that the government, of all institutions, can make healthcare less expensive? It can refuse to pay the expenses, which is different. Other countries have gone that route. They have refused to pay the costs of maintaining the health system and so in places like Britain or Canada you don’t find the same availability of healthcare that you have in the United States.16

In fact, there is an “earthly reason” to believe that the government can make healthcare less expensive. Not only does government healthcare achieve economies of scale, and avoid duplicative administrative burdens, but the absence of profit from the healthcare system eliminates an unnecessary expense.17 The government can make healthcare cheaper for the same reason that it can make firefighting cheaper. Furthermore, the “availability” of healthcare is much greater in Britain than the United States, if we define “availability” as whether people are able to get healthcare. There may be slightly less access to high-end treatments for the superrich, but there is no population of uninsured people. Everyone has quality healthcare available, which is not true in this country.18

Likewise, critiques of regulation are generally based in fear rather than fact. You will hear “regulation” spoken of in the abstract as a bad thing, and many “small government” politicians are elected on promises to cut red tape and rein in regulation. (Donald Trump introduced a rule that for every new regulation the federal government introduced, it had to get rid of two.)19 But while there are critiques that can be made of particular regulations (e.g., the Food and Drug Administration’s sluggishness in approving new medications), there is little evidence that regulation on the whole damages the economy. A paper by economists Nathan Goldschlag and Alex Tabarrok (the latter of whom is a prominent free-market economics blogger) concluded that “regulation, lagged regulation, or changing regulation does not account for the decline in economic dynamism” in the United States.20 Furthermore, sound regulations have produced major positive effects. Here, Daniel Greenbaum of the Health Effects Institute provides a review of the consequences of the Clean Air Act:

[The benefits] have been dramatic. Actions to control emissions from vehicles, factories, electric power plants, and more have reduced emissions of the most prominent pollutants—particulate matter, sulfur oxides, nitrogen oxides, carbon monoxide, volatile organic compounds, and lead—by 73%, even while the U.S. gross domestic product has grown by more than 250%. The progress has been systematic and widespread. As a result of vehicle emission controls, levels of ambient carbon monoxide in the Los Angeles area have fallen from more than 40 ppm in the 1960s to less than 8 ppm today (the current National Ambient Air Quality Standard), even while vehicles and vehicle miles traveled have doubled and tripled, respectively. After detailed efforts to control acid precipitation, levels of sulfate fine air pollution (formed by emissions of sulfur oxides from coal burning) have declined by more than 70% in the Midwest and northeast United States. There is growing evidence that these reductions have translated into health improvements (e.g., a substantial improvement in lung function growth in children growing up in a recent cohort in Southern California when compared with similar cohorts who grew up there in earlier, more highly polluted air).21

To speak of regulation in the abstract, then, ignores the fact that there are obviously positive and necessary government regulatory actions. From the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s efforts to keep customers from being ripped off to the Federal Aviation Administration’s careful assurance of safe air travel,22 we benefit every day from the efforts of those often derided as “meddlesome bureaucrats.” It should be remembered that in years past, the “anti-regulation” crowd fought against measures such as mandatory airbags in cars, with the Reagan administration attempting to repeal the airbag requirement before being rebuked by the Supreme Court. Airbags save thousands of lives every year,23 but automakers didn’t want the extra expense, and Reagan pledged to cut the “red tape.”

In fact, there are areas of life in which there ought to be more regulation. Opiate manufacturers, for instance, got away with marketing campaigns designed to create a generation of addicts—and keep the profits flowing.24 In many countries, tobacco companies have to put prominent warning labels on cigarettes with disturbing illustrations of the risk of cancer. Not in the United States, where some packs of cigarettes do not even warn users that the product is carcinogenic.25 The food industry has for years successfully lobbied to keep “Nutrition Facts” labels from being particularly informative, obscuring how harmful junk food is and making it harder for consumers to make intelligent decisions about what to put in their bodies.26

Government therefore performs a number of absolutely critical roles, and while we should be critical of the excessive use of police and military power, we should be expanding the role of government in a number of spheres. Other countries have shown that government health insurance programs with universal enrollment are a good way to improve the health of a population. In the face of the looming threat of catastrophic climate change, successfully transitioning to renewable energy will require substantial government action. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the American government did too little, not too much, failing to coordinate massive testing and contact tracing early on.27 By contrast with the United States, countries like Vietnam and New Zealand developed a centralized plan for containing the spread of the virus and succeeded in avoiding anything like the kind of calamity that befell this country. (By early 2021, Vietnam had thirty-five COVID-19 deaths total in a population of one hundred million people. Cuba, another country formally under communist governance, had a total of 233 deaths.)28

The conservative ideal of the minimal state—with functions limited to the protection of private property rights and the provision of military and policing services—can be tempting to those who see every other government activity (schooling, regulation, healthcare) as dysfunctional. In fact, this viewpoint is based more on emotion than on fact, and governments do a great deal of work that is socially necessary but not profitable (often because the people being served have very little money).

Philosophical Opposition to Government

Leftism is defined as any political philosophy that seeks to infringe upon individual liberties in its demand for a higher moral good.

—Candace Owens, Blackout

To say that “society” should decide how much it values various goods and services is to say that individual decisions on these matters should be superseded by collective decisions made by political surrogates. But to say this openly would require some persuasive reasons why collective decisions are better than individual decisions and why third parties are better judges than those who are making their own trade-offs at their own expense.… No one would seriously entertain such an arrogant and presumptuous goal, if presented openly, plainly, and honestly.

—Thomas Sowell

Economic power is exercised by means of a positive, by offering men a reward, an incentive, a payment, a value; political power is exercised by means of a negative, by the threat of punishment, injury, imprisonment, destruction. The businessman’s tool is values; the bureaucrat’s tool is fear.

—Ayn Rand

From Geraghty we heard an empirical indictment of government. He argued that conservative opposition to government came from an observation of its real-world activities. We have seen that this view is inaccurate and irrational, that it comes from picking the worst instances of government misconduct and treating them as representative of the whole, rather than from pursuing a systematic evaluation or looking at government performance across countries. But Geraghty had the virtue of at least attempting to ground his critique in real-world events. Much right-wing opposition to government is not of this character. Instead, it flows from a philosophical opposition to government, one that sees many government activities as inherently illegitimate and coercive intrusions upon individual liberty.

This is the view expressed above by Owens, Sowell, and Rand. They have a very simple view of society: the economy consists of “free transactions” being made between millions of people—I buy an ice cream, a hat, a surgical operation, etc., from you. This is the private sector. Along comes Government, however, to meddle in these freely made transactions by telling my employer that they are required to offer me paid family leave, for example, or by insisting on inspecting the meat I buy, or by requiring an airline to let its planes be checked before I am allowed to buy a ticket to fly on one. For many conservatives, the consequences of, say, minimum-wage laws are only part of the issue. Fundamentally, no matter whether these laws produce benefits to workers or not, they are illegitimate, because the state has no right to “interfere” in the “free exchange” made between two parties. Sowell refers to anyone who thinks the government should, for example, try to reduce income inequality, as “the anointed”—people who self-righteously believe their own values should determine which transactions are allowed to occur and under what conditions, who impose these values on others through the use of force, i.e., the state.

For those of Sowell, Rand, and Owens’s persuasion, nothing I have said about the positive consequences of government action will be remotely persuasive. It does not matter if airbags save lives because it is not the government’s place to interfere in “freely made” contracts between willing buyers and willing sellers. Even if the government can make everybody’s lives better, it shouldn’t, because to do so requires coercion, and coercion is almost always inherently an injustice. Nineteenth-century philosopher Herbert Spencer, who pioneered free-market, social Darwinist thought, argued that government couldn’t justifiably even take public health and sanitation measures to stop disease if doing so would involve preventing free-market transactions.29 Robert Nozick, one of the leading libertarian philosophers, argued that the only government that could be justified was “a minimal state, limited, to the narrow functions of protection against force, theft, fraud, enforcement of contracts … any more extensive state will violate persons’ rights not to be forced to do certain things, and is unjustified … the minimal state is inspiring as well as right.”30

Take, for example, the case of wealth redistribution. Jeff Bezos has $150 billion. Once you become extremely rich, each additional dollar you get means less to you. (This is called the principle of diminishing marginal utility and is central to economics. The usual illustrative example given is candy bars: one chocolate bar might make you much happier than zero, but two is not as much of an improvement over one as one was over zero.) For Bezos, the difference between having $149 billion and $150 billion is essentially negligible, even though for a lot of other people, that $1 billion difference would be huge. If the government decides to tax away a billion dollars from Bezos to, for example, give healthcare to people who do not have it, his own life satisfaction would hardly decrease at all, but many other people would see their “utility” drastically increase.

For a pure utilitarian, who believes in producing the greatest good for the greatest number of people, this makes a strong case for the government redistributing wealth.31 But not to someone with a philosophical opposition to state redistribution. For such a person, it wouldn’t matter how much human well-being is generated. Nor would the question of whether taxation had other negative effects (like disincentivizing Bezos from producing) be especially relevant. Taking away his money, even for a good cause, would violate his rights. It is not the role of government. End of story.

It is hard to “refute” this argument because it depends very heavily on a person’s foundational moral beliefs, and foundational moral beliefs tend to be more the product of instinct than reason. If you do not think murder is wrong, it will be difficult for me to persuade you that it is. Likewise, if you think private property rights are more important than human lives, and that the government has no right to interfere with them, there is no way for me to “prove” to you that you should care more about poor people’s health than about rich people’s entitlement to their property.32 I can show you the consequences of holding the “minimal government” view versus the redistributionist view. But if the consequences are irrelevant to your assessment of whether the government’s conduct is legitimate, productive discussion becomes nearly impossible.

Fortunately, hardly anybody does think the consequences of different “rights frameworks” are irrelevant. If, hypothetically, a government could save the world from destruction by violating someone’s private property rights—for example, if a rich man holds the only vaccine that can stop a deadly pandemic but refuses to sell it at any price—very few people would argue that billions should die in order that one person should have their callous invocation of property rights respected. If someone did think it was necessary to let the world perish to make sure a single selfish person didn’t suffer a property rights violation, there would be little one could say in response. But that position goes so far against ordinary human moral instincts that we will not encounter it often.33 And once it is conceded that some violations of property rights are justified to serve some greater goods, we are just left arguing about which greater goods are compelling enough to cross the threshold where the violation of private property rights is justified. In other words: once you admit that there are extreme situations (like the hoarding of a vaccine) where property rights matter less than, for instance, the right to health, what we must discuss is not whether something “is a violation of property rights” but whether it is the kind of violation of property rights that has a compelling argument in its favor.


Copyright © 2023 by Nathan J. Robinson