The Basic Problem of Government

The basic problem of government, from my previous post:

1. Government officials are selfish.

2. Some government actions harm other people but benefit government officials.

3. Prediction: There is going to be a lot of net-harmful government behavior.

Here are four solutions, from the same post:

1. Meta-Government

2. Separation of Powers

3. Constitutions

4. Democracy 

Let’s think about why each of these are weak solutions.

1. Meta-Government

First solution: Establish a second-order government, to punish the first government if it behaves badly.

This creates another iteration of the original problem: What will stop the second-order government from using its powers to serve its own interests, rather than the citizens?

There is also a problem about how the second-order government enforces its decisions. If the second-order government has more power than the first-order government, then it might itself be a greater threat than the organization it was created to police. If it has less power than the first-order government, then it may not be able to control the first-order government.

These problems don’t completely vitiate the meta-government solution, though; it could still reduce government malfeasance. In fact, this solution is drastically under-appreciated; I don’t know why almost no one talks about it. Some notes:

• The 2nd government need not be more powerful overall than the first government. They need to have police who can arrest individual government officials who are misbehaving, but they don’t need to be more powerful than the first government as a whole.

• The 2nd government could also do a bad job. But this might be a smaller problem than the original problem of bad government, because the 2nd government would have less power, over fewer things. It would only have the power to police the 1st government, not a general power of making laws governing everyone.

What kinds of things would the meta-government arrest people for? Probably for violating the Constitution. At present, there is no punishment for violating the Constitution, and Constitutional violations are only adjudicated by another branch of the government whose members were appointed by the same people who are committing those violations.

2. Separation of Powers

Second solution: Divide the government into separate branches, which can compete with and check each other.

Americans are all taught about this in high school civics courses (at least, we used to be; nowadays they may have replaced all those lessons with lessons on race and gender ideology). It’s amazing how many people buy this idea, given how half-baked it is. When I was taught this “checks and balances” theory, no one ever even attempted to explain why we should expect each branch of government to use its powers solely or mainly to prevent the other branches from abusing their powers. The branches could just as easily use their powers to stop the other branches from doing their job, or to help the other branches abuse their powers.

The “checks and balances” theory assumes that the three branches of government are in competition with each other, but no one ever attempted to explain how that was so. On the face of it, the three branches’ interests are in harmony. If the legislature passes laws that go beyond their Constitutionally prescribed purview, that not only makes the legislature more powerful; it also makes the executive and judicial branches more powerful, as they have more laws to enforce. It makes more sense, then, for the three branches to cooperate against their common enemy: the people.

Which of course is what they do. The Supreme Court regularly upholds obviously unconstitutional laws and refuses to review obviously unconstitutional executive behavior (like the time the USSC dismissed a case questioning the President’s right to execute people without trial).

3. Constitutions

Third Solution: Write down a list of things the government is and isn’t allowed to do.

On the face of it, this is childishly naïve—like the idea that we should stop murder by sending all murderers a card notifying them that they are not supposed to murder people anymore.

Constitutions don’t have any independent causal powers. They can only make a difference through the motivations of human agents. If human beings don’t want to follow the Constitution, no one else will show up to make them follow it. Some citizens might be upset that the government is violating the Constitution, but they generally can’t do anything about it, since the government, by design, is the most powerful agent in the society.

Btw, sometimes people get confused about what went wrong with the U.S. Constitution. The Supreme Court tends to supply rationalizations for what the rest of the government wants to do, which causes some people to think the problem is that the Court is just misunderstanding the Constitution. Many people even think that the Constitution is actually being by and large followed, which is mind-boggling to anyone who has read it.

What in fact happened, of course, was that the government disagreed with its own constitution, so they decided to ignore it. The President (esp. FDR, but also pretty much everyone since) decided to appoint people to the Supreme Court who would side with him in expanding government power, and the Senate decided to approve those people. The judges then decided to reject the dictates of said Constitution, then make up absurd rationalizations, presumably on the understanding (which proved to be correct) that there is no rationalization for government misbehavior so ridiculous that some people won’t be fooled by it.

Example: The infamous case of Wickard v. Filburn, where the Supreme Court ruled that restricting the amount of wheat a farmer can grow on his own farm to feed his own animals (where none of the wheat ever leaves the farm) counts as “regulating interstate commerce”.

4. Democracy

Fourth Solution: Have government officials selected by a vote of the public.

Note that the main problem facing all of these solutions is a variant on the original problem. The original problem of human social organization is: Given human selfishness, how do we stop people from acting in ways that benefit themselves but cause a greater harm to others? The governmental solution addresses private selfishness but leaves us with the problem of selfishness by government officials.

The meta-government solution gives us the problem of selfishness by the meta-government. The separation-of-powers and Constitutional solutions leave us with the problem of selfishness by each branch of government. (We could solve the problem if we devised a social structure in which it wouldn’t be in the interests of government officials to violate the Constitution. But most political theorists don’t even attempt to do that.)

The democratic solution seems to get around the problem of government selfishness. But it leaves us with the problem of voter selfishness.

On the face of it, we have an improvement, because if each citizen votes for his self-interest, then the result should be policies that benefit most people. This could still be bad in some cases, because you can benefit a majority at the cost of a greater harm for a minority (e.g., the majority wants to enslave a minority). But at least we won’t have policies that are terrible for almost everyone. Right?

Actually no, we can’t assume that. The problem is that voting for your own interests is not necessarily in your interests.

What, how can that be? Well, identifying what policies are in your interests takes time and effort, and it may be emotionally uncomfortable since it requires confronting and working to overcome your biases. So it’s only in your interests to do that if you expect to get a larger benefit through bringing about better policies. But voters don’t expect that, because, in any large democracy, each individual knows perfectly well that he or she will never actually influence the outcome of any election.

(Yes, voters as a group can influence policy. But you can’t control voters as a group, so that’s irrelevant to your decision-making. You can only control your own, single vote, so what matters is the expected effect of your one vote.)

Most voters have no idea what their elected representatives are doing. Most don’t know their Congressman’s name. Almost no one can name more than a couple of votes their Congressman has cast. (Nor do they know what policies are actually in their interests anyway.) The Congressmen and -women know this, so they have approximately zero incentive to act in the interests even of the majority of voters.

What is democracy good for?

I don’t want to leave the impression that democracy is good for nothing. Democracy is good for avoiding problems that are

• a. Obvious (most people will recognize them if they happen and will know who caused them, without doing a lot of research)

• b. Widespread (a lot of people will be affected)

• c. Immediate (they will happen during the term of office of the politician who caused them).

For instance, if you collectivize agriculture, and then there’s a famine the next year, you’ll probably be voted out, if there are free elections.

Democracies are bad with problems that are subtle, long-term, only affect a minority (especially an unpopular minority), or only harm people who can’t vote. There are quite a lot of those problems, and they are often very serious. E.g., think about the national debt, environmental problems, mass incarceration, slavery (during our more racist past), and wars the government carries on in other countries. It’s really not cool to have no reliable way of addressing these kinds of problems.

Even so, democracy is better than its dominant alternative in history, dictatorship. Dictatorship doesn’t have a good solution to subtle, long-term, etc., problems either. But in addition, it doesn’t even avoid obvious, widespread, immediate disasters. Dictatorial governments will often adopt obviously disastrous policies that cause mass famines, blatantly oppress and murder millions of their own people, etc.

So democracy isn’t maximally awful. To think about: Is democracy the best we can do?