And again, it’s worth underscoring that most of the other advanced countries in the world understand this reality perfectly well, and have built healthy, thriving societies as a result. The kind of subculture of anti-statism that we have here in the US – which insists that government can never do anything right, that taxation is theft, etc. – just isn’t really as much of a thing in these other countries, as Paul Kienitz points out:
This received wisdom about the inevitable ineptitude of government is hardly a universally recognized law; rather, it is a peculiarly American cultural attitude, hardly found in most other industrialized nations that have roughly similar experience with problems of governance. It is more a product of anti-statist ideology than a cause of it.
And this relative lack of hostility toward government makes a real difference in those countries’ ability to successfully govern themselves. To return one last time to our recurring example of the Nordic countries, one of the biggest reasons why they’ve been so successful with their governments is that they don’t really have anything equivalent to our Republican Party. They do have right-wing political parties, of course, but they don’t have parties (at least not popular ones) that are so right-wing that their members routinely call for the outright dismantling of the social safety net, or actively try to undermine their government’s ability to even function in the first place. Pretty much everyone in the Nordic countries – even those on the more conservative end of the political spectrum – understands that government is necessary (and in fact preferable) for providing certain services, and agrees that it has a legitimate role to play in improving citizens’ lives. So while naturally, there are still plenty of differences of opinion regarding how that goal should best be pursued, and Nordic governments still have their share of disputes over all kinds of object-level issues, they nonetheless enjoy a pretty universal consensus on the more general question of whether government should even be significantly involved in the economy at all. For them, electing leaders whose primary goal was to “completely get government out of our lives” would make about as much sense as, say, hiring a die-hard Luddite to work as the CEO of Google or something. The Nordic approach might seem like Big Government run amok to a lot of Americans. But Nordics themselves simply regard it as a healthy balance between the public and private sectors. They don’t regard their government as an enemy of the market, but as a legitimate supplement to it; in the same way that the private market allows them to fulfill their needs on an individual basis, the government serves as a tool for them to fulfill their collective needs – simple as that. And accordingly, their societies have flourished; as Krugman writes:
[The Nordic system, often denounced by American conservatives as “socialism,” is in fact] what the rest of the world calls social democracy: A market economy, but with extreme hardship limited by a strong social safety net and extreme inequality limited by progressive taxation.
[And contrary to conservative attempts to liken social democracy to Soviet-style dystopia,] the Nordic countries are not, in fact, hellholes. They have somewhat lower G.D.P. per capita than we do, but that’s largely because they take more vacations. Compared with America, they have higher life expectancy, much less poverty and significantly higher overall life satisfaction. Oh, and they have high levels of entrepreneurship — because people are more willing to take the risk of starting a business when they know that they won’t lose their health care or plunge into abject poverty if they fail.
It seems pretty clear, then, that there’s something of value to be learned from the Nordics’ example. We don’t have to make a binary choice between strong markets and strong social safety nets; as mentioned before, we can have a system in which the strength of one reinforces the strength of the other.
Of course, striking the right balance between the public sector and the private sector isn’t an exact science; there’s not some precise paint-by-numbers formula that every country can follow to achieve perfect results in all circumstances. Nevertheless, there are certain general principles that do seem valuable – including the interesting idea from Ashwin Parameswaran that I mentioned in the last post, which I’ll just repeat again here. Parameswaran notes that here in the US, whenever conservatives complain about the balance tipping too far in the government’s direction, their most cogent complaints tend to be about the scope of government extending too far – i.e. the government needlessly extending its regulatory tentacles into too many private-sector activities – whereas when liberals complain about there being an imbalance, their most cogent complaints tend to be about the scale of government being insufficient – i.e. the government not doing enough in the key areas where it’s most necessary. What Parameswaran proposes, then, is that the best kind of government might be one that’s constrained in its scope while being generous in its scale – i.e. a government that limits itself to a narrow core domain of public goods and services but is very active within that narrow domain. In other words, the best approach might be to give the market as much free rein as possible, and to let the forces of creative destruction exert their full effects even if it means that jobs and businesses are constantly being created and destroyed – but, crucially, to also have a robust government-funded safety net ready to catch anyone whose job or business has fallen victim to this creative destruction, and to quickly re-equip them to bounce back again as smoothly as possible. In Parameswaran’s words:
A robust safety net is as important to maintaining an innovative free enterprise economy as the dismantling of entry barriers and free enterprise are to reducing inequality.
And sure enough, that seems to be exactly the kind of approach that has worked so well for the Nordics. They generally allow the free market to do its thing without trying to micromanage every little transaction with regulations and price controls and so on – but they also make sure that everyone is sufficiently well-protected from the worst downside risks (poverty, homelessness, etc.) that no one has to be afraid of participating fully in the market, taking chances on entrepreneurship, and making the most of their resources. The upshot of this is that Nordics know their government has their back, not that it’s just there to get in their way. And consequently, their attitude toward government isn’t typically one of hostility but one of willing participation; rather than regarding their government as some alien antagonist that can do nothing but destroy their freedom, they tend to regard it more as an extension of their collective democratic will, and therefore as a fundamental expression of their freedom. This isn’t necessarily to say that all of them feel this way, obviously – I don’t want to overgeneralize here – but compared to our attitudes here in the US, at least, there tends to be a much more positive kind of dynamic overall. In the US, we’re a lot more inclined to be suspicious of government, contemptuous of politicians, and loath to give up our tax dollars for any reason, even for ostensibly good reasons. But it’s unfortunate for us that this is the case, because as the Nordics’ example demonstrates, it’s possible to have a relationship with government that’s much more collaborative and productive, and to realize all kinds of positive benefits as a result.
In my opinion, then, it seems worth taking seriously the idea that maybe we can actually do better. If Kienitz really is right that our worst stereotypes about government are more a product of anti-statist ideology than a cause of it, then maybe our relationship with government doesn’t actually have to be as adversarial as it currently is. Maybe if we can start to get past the kind of knee-jerk anti-statism that so often causes us to reflexively dismiss everything the government does as terrible, we’ll find that we can actually build a positive relationship between ourselves and our government, just as other countries have done. And maybe if we can do that, we’ll realize that there’s actually a lot to appreciate about having a functional democratic government – because after all, despite our system’s flaws (and despite the fact that it’s not quite as good as the Nordics’ in many areas), it is still vastly better than practically every other system in world history, and we enjoy all kinds of benefits because of it that most people are never lucky enough to enjoy. We don’t always realize just how much it does for us, as Wheelan points out, but the benefits are real nonetheless, and we do ourselves no favors by believing otherwise:
Thousands of planes landed safely today. Children did not choke on plastic toys. Terrorists did not strike Los Angeles. Government deserves some credit for all of those things. One inherent challenge of public policy is obvious only once you think about it: success is often invisible, or even annoying, since averting harm is not necessarily recognized as success.
Suppose that around 2005, regulators had cracked down on irresponsible mortgage lending and all of the other attendant unsavory practices that led to the global financial crisis. In 2013, would politicians, business leaders, and pundits be heaping praise on this regulatory foresight?
No. Instead, left-leaning critics would be blasting regulators for constraining credit to low-income families and denying them a piece of the American dream (with no awareness that these subprime mortgages would have turned into the American nightmare). Right-leaning critics would be blasting the same regulators for constraining the private sector and hurting profitability (with no awareness that regulators had averted a complete meltdown of the global financial system).
Do you think the CEO of Lehman Brothers would give a speech praising regulators for saving the firm from itself? Of course not, because there would be no awareness that the firm needed saving. This is a stark contrast to the private sector, where success is obvious: innovation, profits, publicity. When government works, we often see nothing but the tax bill—so it should be no great surprise that Americans across the political spectrum are not keen to send bigger checks to the government.
Commenter randomnoise (with tongue firmly in cheek) illustrates the idea even more pointedly:
This morning I was awoken by my alarm clock powered by electricity generated by the public power monopoly regulated by the US Department of Energy. I then took a shower in the clean water provided by the municipal water utility.
After that, I turned on the TV to one of the FCC-regulated channels to see what the National Weather Service of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration determined the weather was going to be like using satellites designed, built, and launched by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. I watched this while eating my breakfast of US Department of Agriculture-inspected food and taking the drugs which have been determined as safe by the Food and Drug Administration.
At the appropriate time, as regulated by the US Congress and kept accurate by the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the US Naval Observatory, I get into my National Highway Traffic Safety Administration-approved automobile and set out to work on the roads build by the local, state, and federal Departments of Transportation, possibly stopping to purchase additional fuel of a quality level determined by the Environmental Protection Agency, using legal tender issued by the Federal Reserve. On the way out the door I deposit any mail I have to be sent out via the US Postal Service and drop the kids off at the public school.
After spending another day not being maimed or killed at work thanks to the workplace regulations imposed by the Department of Labor and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, enjoying another two meals which again do not kill me because of the USDA, I drive my NHTSA car back home on the DOT roads, to my house which has not burned down in my absence because of the state and local building codes and fire marshal’s inspection, and which has not been plundered of all its valuables thanks to the local police department.
I then log on to the Internet which was developed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Administration and post on freerepublic.com and Fox News forums about how SOCIALISM in medicine is BAD because the government can’t do anything right.
[Q]: Okay, fine. But that’s a special case where, given an infinite budget, they were able to accomplish something that private industry had no incentive to try. And to their credit, they did pull it off, but do you have any examples of government succeeding at anything more practical?
Eradicating smallpox and polio globally, and cholera and malaria from their endemic areas in the US. Inventing the computer, mouse, digital camera, and email. Building the information superhighway and the regular superhighway. Delivering clean, practically-free water and cheap on-the-grid electricity across an entire continent. Forcing integration and leading the struggle for civil rights. Setting up the Global Positioning System. Ensuring accurate disaster forecasts for hurricanes, volcanoes, and tidal waves. Zero life-savings-destroying bank runs in eighty years. Inventing nuclear power and the game theory necessary to avoid destroying the world with it.
[Q]: All right… all right… but apart from better sanitation and medicine and education and irrigation and public health and roads and a freshwater system and baths and public order… what has the government done for us?
I think there’s a way in which government has been othered by 30 or 40 years of neoliberal ideology, so it’s been turned into some alien invading force. And yeah, it’s hugely imperfect, and we’ve all been to the DMV, and a lot of parts of the government are more like the DMV than not. But I also think, when government works, we don’t think about it. I mean, I have lived in other countries. I’ve lived in countries where every meal in a restaurant is a dangerous experience, right. I’m not sure I remember the last time I got sick eating in a restaurant in America. Do you understand, like, what a civilizational accomplishment that is? You understand how hard that is to achieve? If you travel the world you understand that’s a precarious fragile thing that is a goddamn miracle we’ve been able to pull off. And there’s a thousand little miracles like that. When I put a car seat in my car, it does not occur to me that it’s not properly tested, that it won’t work if there’s an accident. Like, when I buy a car, it does not occur to me that, like, it’s not safe – as safe as it could be in the case of an accident. And are there exceptions? Yeah. But in general, we forget that yeah, government’s frustrating and annoying and inefficient, but like, what it is doing in an unsung way every day, that allows us to not be in the situation that, frankly, most countries in the world are still in, is a fucking miracle. So the government is your dysfunctional family, but you don’t go to a restaurant eat alone on Thanksgiving. You go to your dysfunctional family and you try to make it better.
(And just to reinforce his point, it’s worth mentioning that even the DMV, in spite of its bad reputation, actually seems to have improved quite a bit in recent years, and isn’t considered nearly as unpleasant these days as it used to be.)
To grow and prosper, a country needs laws, law enforcement, courts, basic infrastructure, a government capable of collecting taxes—and a healthy respect among the citizenship for each of these things. These kinds of institutions are the tracks on which capitalism runs. They must be reasonably honest. Corruption is not merely an inconvenience, as it is sometimes treated; it is a cancer that misallocates resources, stifles innovation, and discourages foreign investment. While American attitudes toward government range from indifference to hostility, most other countries would love to have it so good, as New York Times foreign affairs columnist Tom Friedman has pointed out:
I took part in a seminar two weeks ago at Nanjing University in China, and I can still hear a young Chinese graduate student pleading for an answer to her question: “How do we get rid of all our corruption?” Do you know what your average Chinese would give to have a capital like Washington today, with its reasonably honest and efficient bureaucracy? Do you know how unusual we are in the world that we don’t have to pay off bureaucrats to get the simplest permit issued?
The relationship between government institutions and economic growth prompted a clever and intriguing study. Economists Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, and James Robinson hypothesized that the economic success of developing countries that were formerly colonized has been affected by the quality of the institutions that their colonizers left behind. The European powers adopted different colonization policies in different parts of the world, depending on how hospitable the area was to settlement. In places where Europeans could settle without serious hardship, such as the United States, the colonizers created institutions that have had a positive and long-lasting effect on economic growth. In places where Europeans could not easily settle because of a high mortality rate from disease, such as the Congo, the colonizers simply focused on taking as much wealth home as quickly as possible, creating what the authors refer to as “extractive states.”
The study examined sixty-four ex-colonies and found that as much as three-quarters of the difference in their current wealth can be explained by differences in the quality of their government institutions. In turn, the quality of those government institutions is explained, at least in part, by the original settlement pattern. The legal origin of the colonizers—British, French, Belgian—had little influence (though the British come out looking good because they tended to colonize places more hospitable to settlement).
Basically, good governance matters. The World Bank rated 150 countries on six broad measures of governance, such as accountability, regulatory burden, rule of law, graft (corruption), etc. There was a clear and causal relationship between better governance and better development outcomes, such as higher per capita incomes, lower infant mortality, and higher literacy. We don’t have to love the Internal Revenue Service, but we ought to at least offer it some grudging respect.
Granted, it’s not always easy to muster up a whole lot of enthusiasm for the IRS. Even despite everything our government does for us – or more accurately, everything we do for ourselves through our government – most Americans’ response when it comes time to pay the tax bill is one of annoyance, if not outright resentment, as Chomsky notes:
In [an idealized] democracy, tax day would be a day of celebration – here, we’ve gotten together as a community, we’ve decided on certain policies, and now we’re moving to implement them by our own participation. But that’s not the way it’s viewed in the US. It’s a day of mourning; there’s this alien entity, which is stealing our hard-earned money from us, and we have to give it up, we have no choice. That reflects the undermining of even a conception of democracy.
No doubt, a lot of this is surely due to the popular conception of government as corrupt and inefficient; if we’re all convinced that the government is just going to throw away our tax dollars on needlessly wasteful projects, we probably aren’t going to be thrilled about it. But I think part of it is also due to a general reluctance to have to sacrifice anything of ours for the good of others at all; even if we believed our tax dollars were 100% going to those in need, I think part of us would still subconsciously resent having to give up own hard-earned wealth, just because it’s ours and we want to keep it. Many of us seem (at least somewhat) to have internalized a model of human behavior which says that because we humans are naturally inclined to act in our own narrow self-interest, that means that always caring solely about ourselves is therefore appropriate and expected – that it’s somehow irrational to want to make sure that others are taken care of too. (This is the Homo economicus model of human behavior that I’ve discussed here previously.) Chomsky describes it acerbically:
[According to this attitude,] Social Security, public schools, and other deviations from [the narrowest conception of self-interest] are based on evil doctrines, among them the pernicious belief that we should care, as a community, whether the disabled widow on the other side of town can make it through the day, or the child next door should have a chance for a decent future. These evil doctrines derive from the principle of sympathy that was taken to be the core of human nature by Adam Smith and David Hume, a principle that must be driven from the mind.
He’s obviously being sarcastic here, but I do think he’s pointing at a kind of attitude that really does exist – not that it’s necessarily wrong to care about other people, of course, but that if nothing else, we don’t have to care about other people; we aren’t obligated to care for them. As Singer writes:
Libertarians resist the idea that we have a duty to help others. Canadian philosopher Jan Narveson articulates that point of view:
We are certainly responsible for evils we inflict on others, no matter where, and we owe those people compensation . . . Nevertheless, I have seen no plausible argument that we owe something, as a matter of general duty, to those to whom we have done nothing wrong.
There is, at first glance, something attractive about the political philosophy that says: “You leave me alone, and I’ll leave you alone, and we’ll get along just fine.” It appeals to the frontier mentality, to an ideal of life in the wide-open spaces where each of us can carve out our own territory and live undisturbed by the neighbors. Yet there is a callous side to a philosophy that denies that we have any responsibilities to those who, through no fault of their own, are in need. Taking libertarianism seriously would require us to abolish all state-supported welfare programs for those who can’t get a job or are ill or disabled, and all state-funded health care for the aged and for those who are too poor to pay for their own health insurance. Few people really support such extreme views.
And it’s true – most people, if you put it to them directly, wouldn’t be able to bring themselves to support something as blatant as the outright abolition of all public social programs. Still, a lot of people do nevertheless feel an underlying reluctance to actually pay the taxes to fund those programs, both because of the nagging unease that their money might be going to someone who doesn’t deserve it, and because of the more general annoyance that they have to give up their money for any reason at all. The result of this, unfortunately, is that even when we make genuine efforts to help needy people, these efforts are often suffused with a thinly-veiled tension; even after we’ve thoroughly means-tested recipients to reassure ourselves that they really do need government assistance, we’ll still gripe about having to pay the taxes to provide that assistance, making it clear how much we mistrust the recipients and begrudge them their inability to fully take care of themselves. As James Gilligan puts it:
The […] ethos of “rugged individualism,” and the social Darwinism that continues to dominate so much public discourse, make it almost impossible for us to take care of people without humiliating them first.
But punishing the needy isn’t exactly an ideal foundation upon which to build a successful civilization. It may be true that there are some people who receive government support who really shouldn’t – welfare cheats, corrupt corporations, etc. (although such cases are much less of an issue than most voters imagine them to be). But there are also a lot of people who genuinely are in need – people who’ve worked hard and done their best, but have simply fallen on hard times or caught some bad breaks. The question we have to answer, then, is whether we want to err on the side of giving more help than is strictly necessary, even if it means occasionally helping someone who doesn’t really need it, or giving too little help, and potentially leaving the genuinely needy out in the cold. For my money, I’d say the answer is obvious: It’s better to err on the side of decency and compassion than to refuse to help anyone out of fear that someone might not have done enough to deserve it.
In fact, speaking more generally, I think it’s quite clear that this whole adversarial attitude, of treating all human interaction as inherently zero-sum, is a fundamentally corrosive one, and one we should be trying our best to get past. When we have this kind of relationship with each other that’s antagonistic by default, it isn’t just bad for us as individuals; it undermines the cohesion of our society as a whole, in a way that makes us all worse off. The truth is, we don’t have to treat our relationships as zero-sum – it really is possible for us to collaborate in ways that make us all better off – and the moments when we realize that and take advantage of it are when our society flourishes most. As Gawande writes:
The Berkeley sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild spent five years listening to Tea Party supporters in Louisiana, and in her masterly book “Strangers in Their Own Land” she identifies what she calls the deep story that they lived and felt. Visualize a long line of people snaking up a hill, she says. Just over the hill is the American Dream. You are somewhere in the middle of that line. But instead of moving forward you find that you are falling back. Ahead of you, people are cutting in line. You see immigrants and shirkers among them. It’s not hard to imagine how infuriating this could be to some, how it could fuel an America First ideal, aiming to give pride of place to “real” Americans and demoting those who would undermine that identity—foreigners, Muslims, Black Lives Matter supporters, feminists, “snowflakes.”
Our political debates seem to focus on what the rules should be for our place in line. Should the most highly educated get to move up to the front? The most talented? Does seniority matter? What about people whose ancestors were cheated and mistreated?
The mistake is accepting the line, and its dismal conception of life as a zero-sum proposition. It gives up on the more encompassing possibilities of shared belonging, mutual loyalty, and collective gains. America’s founders believed these possibilities to be fundamental. They held life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness to be “unalienable rights” possessed equally by all members of their new nation. The terms of membership have had to be rewritten a few times since, sometimes in blood. But the aspiration has endured, even as what we need to fulfill it has changed.
When the new country embarked on its experiment in democracy, [something like] health care was too primitive to matter to life or liberty. The average citizen was a hardscrabble rural farmer who lived just forty years. People mainly needed government to insure physical security and the rule of law. Knowledge and technology, however, expanded the prospects of life and liberty, and, accordingly, the requirements of government. During the next two centuries, we relied on government to establish a system of compulsory public education, infrastructure for everything from running water to the electric grid, and old-age pensions, along with tax systems to pay for it all. As in other countries, these programs were designed to be universal. For the most part, we didn’t divide families between those who qualified and those who didn’t, between participants and patrons. This inclusiveness is likely a major reason that these policies have garnered such enduring support.
And this is the important thing to keep in mind when it comes to government; good government, even though it often involves things like taxation and regulation that can annoy us as individuals, is ultimately about making sure everyone can thrive. That’s the whole point of it – creating conditions in which every person, from the most privileged to the most disadvantaged, can have the opportunity for a decent life. This may mean that some people will need more help than others – in fact, it’s basically a certainty that there will always be some people who need more help than others – but to reiterate our point from earlier, that doesn’t mean they’re not worth helping. After all, as judgmental as we can often be about who truly “deserves” help and who doesn’t, the truth is that the people whose lives seem the most unsalvageable are often those who can benefit from help the most. So if we can move ourselves even just a little bit closer to the kind of society in which everyone – even the most miserable among us – can be happy and successful, why shouldn’t we want to do that?
Kelsey Piper has a post which, while not explicitly being about government per se, really gets at the heart of what I’m trying to convey here:
I think a big part of how I see the world is that –
In college I was sick. In particular I was anorexic, and I nearly starved myself to death. I never accomplished anything, made commitments I couldn’t keep, lost track of time, and struggled with the most basic life tasks. I was anxious (mostly because I correctly knew that everything was going horribly) and lazy (because I could not possibly do enough things to matter, and doing things was hard and hurt) and unreliable and terrible. I ended up owing people a lot of money (I have since paid them all back) and failing at things that were really important to me and to other people.
And now I am in a good environment for me. I live with people who I can be reasonably assured don’t hate me and will tell me when they need me to do things differently, and I am no longer anxious. My work has clear expectations and is bite-sized and doesn’t pile up on me, and I reliably deliver it and do a good job. I have enough money I don’t have to deal with the mental overhead of deciding whether to buy the food I want, and I spend that mental overhead on better things. I am still messy and I am still bad at getting places on time, but I’m never late on rent. I am mostly a productive, honest, trustworthy, reliable person and I’m getting better at those things. I have friends and kiss girls (and the occasional boy) and I make a positive difference in peoples’ lives.
Some of the difference was immaturity and lack of skills; much of the difference is that I had starved my brain until it stopped functioning; much of the difference was that I was in an environment that was not shaped to my strengths. But living through it gave me this powerful sense that the difference between a “lazy” person and a “successful” person, between a reliable person and an unreliable person, between a “good” person and a “bad” person, is a lot about whether they are in an environment shaped to their strengths. That almost everybody will be great in the right environment and really really struggle in a bad one. And some people have never ever encountered a bad one and think they’re just inherently great; and some people have never encountered a good one, and think they’re just inherently miserable and hard to get along with and unreliable and untrustworthy.
I absolutely think people are still accountable for the things they do in bad environments. I’ve worked really hard to fix the things I fucked up at when I was sick, and I don’t mean “it’s all the environment” to mean “it’s not you”. Just – the same you who was miserable and did bad things will be happy and do good things, in better circumstances, and lots of the human project is building those circumstances.
I don’t know how to give everyone an environment in which they’ll thrive. It’s probably absurdly hard, in lots of cases it is, in practical terms, impossible. But I basically always feel like it’s the point, and that anything else is missing the point. There are people whose brains are permanently-given-our-current-capabilities stuck functioning the way my brain functioned when I was very sick. And I encounter, sometimes, “individual responsibility” people who say “lazy, unproductive, unreliable people who choose not to work choose their circumstances; if they go to bed hungry then, yes, they deserve to be hungry; what else could ‘deserve’ possibly mean?” They don’t think they’re talking to me; I have a six-figure tech job and do it well and save for retirement and pay my bills, just like them. But I did not deserve to be hungry when I was sick, either, and I would not deserve to be hungry if I’d never gotten better.
What else could ‘deserve’ possibly mean? When I use it, I am pointing at the ‘give everyone an environment in which they’ll thrive’ thing. People with terminal cancer deserve a cure even though right now we don’t have one; deserving isn’t a claim about what we have, but about what we would want to give out if we had it. And so, to me, horrible people who abuse others all the time deserve an environment in which they would thrive and not be able to abuse others, even if we can’t provide one and don’t even have any idea what it would look like and sensibly are prioritizing other people who don’t abuse others. If you have experiences, you deserve good experiences; if you have feelings, you deserve happy feelings; if you want to be loved, you are worthy of love. You flourishing is a moral good; everybody flourishing is in fact the only moral good, the entire thing morality is for. Your actions should have consequences, sure, and we should figure out how to build a world where those consequences are ones that you can handle, and where you can amend the things that you do wrong. When you hurt people, that can change what “you thriving” looks like, because part of thriving is fixing, and growing from, things you have done wrong; but nothing you do can change that it is good for you to thrive.
I reject that I ever deserved to starve, and so I reject that anyone, ever, deserves to starve. I reject that I ever deserved to suffer, and so I reject that anyone, ever, deserves to suffer. Happiness is good. Your happiness is good. And without a single exception anywhere I want you to thrive.
When I talk about making sure everyone is adequately taken care of, this is what I mean. There will be times in all of our lives – even if it’s just when we’re helpless infants – when we’ll be unable to fully take care of ourselves and will need help from others. That help may come in large part from friends and family – or if it’s goods or services that we need, it may come from private-sector sellers or organizations. And ideally, if we’re lucky, we won’t require much more than that; if the market is working properly, it’ll be sufficient to provide us with most of what we need. In some cases, though, the market won’t be enough on its own. In some cases, we’ll need certain services that we either can’t afford to buy in the private sector, or that the private sector simply isn’t equipped to provide at all. And in those cases, government will have a legitimate role to play – not just in making sure that our most basic needs for survival are met, but in providing things like public infrastructure and education and so on that allow us to function productively in a broader society as well. All the things we’ve been discussing throughout this entire post – correcting for externalities, protecting property rights, enforcing regulations to maintain public health and safety, etc. – are things that help create the kind of social conditions in which we aren’t just able to survive, but can actually flourish and realize accomplishments beyond mere survival, like building safe neighborhoods, starting successful businesses, making new scientific discoveries, and so on. And they’re all things that can only be adequately provided by government.
So although it might sometimes feel grating to have to pay taxes, it’s worth bearing in mind that those tax dollars are precisely what have allowed us to elevate our civilization beyond mere subsistence-level existence. Granted, it’s always possible for those tax dollars to be misused – which is why it’s so important to continually maintain strong democratic checks on government power so it doesn’t overstep its bounds and end up doing more harm than good. Government is powerful, so if it’s corrupt or oppressive or flawed in some other serious way, it can choke the life out of a society. But for that very same reason, if it’s not too seriously flawed, it can use its immense power for good, and can nurture a society and help it flourish to an extent that wouldn’t otherwise be possible. To borrow an analogy from Neil Chilson, good government can be like a trellis, which doesn’t get in the way of the vines, but provides them with a support structure that enables them to climb higher than they’d ever be able to alone. And if we can embrace this way of thinking about government – not as something we have to grudgingly put up with, but as a powerful tool that can potentially serve as a multiplier of our productivity and well-being – then maybe we can stop getting so hung up on the idea that government has to be a particular size, and can instead focus on what really matters, which is how much good it’s doing. Our answer to the question of “How big should our government be?” can simply be “However big it needs to be to maximize our well-being.” And in turn, we can give ourselves the ability to accomplish more collectively than we ever could as separate, isolated individuals.
There’s a popular phrase, “The Law of the Jungle,” which is generally used interchangeably with phrases like “survival of the fittest” and “everyone for themselves” as a way of indicating that we live in a dog-eat-dog world in which no one can truly trust anyone except themselves. In other words, “The Law of the Jungle” is basically taken as a shorthand for a complete absence of laws. Ironically, though, the actual origin of the phrase is a poem in Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book, which lays out a code of conduct specifically designed to prevent such disharmony and ensure that everyone will be able to live in cooperation with each other. And its most memorable line is a flat-out negation of the “everyone for themselves” mentality, which simply says:
The strength of the pack is the wolf, and the strength of the wolf is the pack.
I don’t think there’s any better way of encapsulating what it means to have a healthy, productive society. Our ability to succeed as a collective whole depends largely on how much we can nurture the talents of our individual members; and by that same token, our ability as individuals to make the most of our talents depends largely on how much opportunity is created for us by our society. In the interest of creating the greatest possible opportunity for everyone in our society, then, here’s to working together. ∎
N.W. Rains 