Imposing Regulatory State is Causing the Decline of the West

I think decadence in the West is a result of a gradual change in the goals government pursues and the way government operates.  The basis of Western Civilization, and arguably any civilization, is the rule of law.  Without predictability, economic investments with long term payoffs are impossible to make.  Our current prosperity began with John Locke’s idea, from his 1690 “Two Treatises on Government,” that government required the consent of the governed and that government’s purpose was to secure the life, liberty and property of the people it governed. The way Western "democratic" governments operate today is to have experts make regulatory decisions for people without their consent.  Government makes people follow rules that it thinks are good for them, and redistributes property in the name of social justice, which usually means buying votes with entitlements.

English history from 1600 to 1700 was very important to the Founders who set up the United States.  The Declaration of Independence was the American Colonies’ formal withdrawal of our consent to be governed by King George III.  This was especially important because King George III was King of England by the Act of Settlement passed in 1701, which chose the Hanoverians over the Stuarts to be Kings of England.  In other words, King George II was King of England by consent of the governed.  There were several contemporary claimants to the throne of England with better rights of descent than George III.

The Constitutional requirement that the president see “that the laws be faithfully executed” was a reaction to Charles I (1600-1649) and James II (1633-1701), who ignored parliamentary laws whenever they found the laws inconvenient.  The 2nd Amendment right to bear arms was an attempt to prevent military dictatorship, like the one imposed by Oliver Cromwell from 1653 to 1658.

The economic enlightenment started by Adam Smith (1723-1790), which Frederic Bastiat (1801-1850) extended, argued that economic prosperity required minimal government interference beyond a stable legal framework to enforce commercial contracts.  Common practice at the time they wrote was for the government to grant huge monopolies to private companies, like the British East India Company, which was granted India.  Government granted monopolies then are very similar to crony capitalism today.  Smith and Bastiat argued against government granted monopolies. They said the economy would do better without heavy handed government interference.

 

Starting in 1887, with the passage of the law creating the Interstate Commerce Commission to regulate rail road freight rates, US government moved away from the rule of law and towards regulatory guidelines which could be micromanaged.  Starting with the New Deal, the US changed the function of government to constraining liberty and redistributing property.  The New Deal era also produced John Maynard Keynes’ idea that government spending stimulates the economy.  Prior to Keynes, governments limited spending and tried to cut taxes during hard times.  Ironically, one of Keynes most famous quotes is that politicians “are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.”  Most Western politicians in power today are the slaves of John Maynard Keynes.

Today, Western democratic governments are not really democratic.  The most important decisions are made by unelected and unaccountable bureaucrats in regulatory agencies and judges who are changing rather than interpreting the law.  The governing philosophy is that the consent of the governed is no longer needed because the governed are too ignorant to know what’s good for them.  Only government experts can make the best decisions for the people.  Increasingly, governments pay people not to work, not to take initiative and not to even try to take care of themselves.  In responding to the incentives to become dependent on the state, people are contributing to their personal decline and also to the decline and fall of the West.  When a civilization’s bill for bread and circuses, now known as transfer payments, becomes so large that they can no longer afford an army to protect themselves, the decline becomes terminal.

The way to reverse the decline is to remove the power from regulatory agencies and judges to make law without the approval of elected representatives.  We also need to stop paying people to be dependent on the state and encourage them to become independent and think for themselves.  If you give a man a fish, he’s hungry tomorrow.  If you teach a man to fish, he can feed himself by fishing every day.  If you give a man a fish every day, why would he make any effort to learn how to fish?

Progressives Explain Trump Voters: Racist or Ignorant

Progressives can’t believe they lost.  They are riding on an absolute gusher of denial.  They offer the standard racist and sexist explanations.  Unfortunately, there are a lot of counties who voted for Obama in 2008 that went Trump in 2016.  Did it take those voters 8 years to get new glasses and notice Obama was black?  But he sounded so white!  Sorry, that just doesn’t work.  So try ignorance.


This article likes the ignorance explanation to the point where it starts talking about tests voters should have to pass to qualify to vote.  http://foreignpolicy.com/2016/11/10/the-dance-of-the-dunces-trump-clinton-election-republican-democrat/


I am old enough to remember when literacy tests were used to keep blacks from voting in Southern States. This article complains about voter ignorance and considers various ways to keep the "uninformed" from voting. I think "uninformed" is a progressive dog whistle for racial, religious and social class based discrimination against redneck whites. Coming from the same people who claim that requiring voters to show ID is racist, this is really sky high hypocrisy.


The Trump voters in this election were very informed about how government policies in the last 8 years have hurt them personally. They have watched factories close, regulations strangle local businesses and many of their friends become so discouraged in the search for work that they have given up trying to find a job. They know that the government values reduced carbon emissions over their livelihoods. They know that the government considers their religion worthless. They know that the government wants to completely destroy their culture. They know that the government encourages colleges to discriminate against their children on the basis of race. They're fed up with it all. They voted for a candidate that promised to fix it.


In order to really understand the paragraph above, liberals should imagine their outrage if the victims were black.

Big Data Does Not Make Big Government Work

Big government advocates are always looking for reasons why this time big government will work.  They have to do this because every time big government is tried, it fails.  Big government can’t work as well as a free market because the amount of information a central government can absorb and use to make decisions is far less than the information that markets process to set prices.  The latest excuse for big government is that computerized big data will finally make big government possible.  I think this is another big lie.

When you use any model, you have to check it against reality. No matter how big a model is, it involves simplification at some level because your computational power has limits and you can’t run the model with the behavior of every person in society mapped into the model. The temptation is to manage to the model, rather than manage to reality, because the model has a prettier dashboard display and is more accessible.  You can run lots of different “what if?” scenarios through your model and convince yourself you understand everything.  In fact, all you understand is how the model behaves, not how the real world is going to behave.

The fashion in big government at the moment is to assume that a central government can run everything more efficiently than a collection of disorganized private firms, charities, states, provinces and local governments. This conceit has led to world-wide malaise, economic stagnation and civic frustration. For one thing, it’s insulting. The old John Locke model of government by the consent of the governed implicitly assumes that the governed are smart enough to give informed consent. The current, Big Brother, style of government assumes that the government knows better than individuals what’s good for them. No matter how big your data is, that’s insulting and ridiculous.  You can never know someone better than they know themselves.

You should also take note that large political organizations have a tendency to resist innovation and then to implement innovation poorly. When they implement new technology, they tend to spend a lot of money and buy over designed garbage, like the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. Government is good at sponsoring basic research and even proof of concept. They have no idea how to implement things efficiently. The Obamacare roll out disaster is a typical big government technical project.

If you check the growth rates in the US and UK under Reagan and Thatcher, and compare them to the last 8 years, you will notice a big difference. The lesson is that big government doesn’t work, even with big data.

Original article:

https://www.aei.org/publication/infinite-information-problem-and-what-proponents-of-state-centralization-miss/