The Purgatory of Freedom and the Hell of Politics

The best way to have a good political system is to avoid politics. But political disengagement deprives us of opportunities for bitching at politicians and pushing them around. This is occasionally useful and always a pleasure. In our democracy we don’t get in trouble by trying to make politicians mad. We get in trouble by trying to make them like us. Our political system goes to hell when we want it to give us things.

There are certain things we may reasonably demand of our political system, of course. But most of these things are negative rights. And often it’s the political system itself that’s violating those rights. The most sensible request we make of government is not “Do something!” but “Quit it!”

As for our positive rights and the goodies we expect to gain with them, we’re confusing politics with Halloween. Politicians don’t mind. They love devising programs of incentives and disincentives for the populace. Trick or treat! And a ghouls and goblins political system is fine for those among us who are really scary. But, for the rest of us, don’t be surprised if we go house to house—White House to House of Representatives to Senate—and, ringing doorbells as furiously as we may, get nothing but healthy fruit.

If there’s something we want, politics shouldn’t be our first resort. Politics is all taking, no making. Whatever politics provides for us will be obtained from other people. Those people won’t love us.

And we don’t love them. When we gain our ends through political takings it’s because of a certain bad idea. What we’re thinking leads to death, destruction, and taxes. What we’re thinking is that we live in a zero-sum world: there is a fixed amount of the things I want, and when anybody has anything I want they’ve taken it from me.

This is a particularly poisonous idea because for most of history it was true. There may have been a prehistorical moment when all we had to do to get more mastodon meat was walk over the next hill and avail ourselves of some unpopulated spot such as Europe. But civilization is based on land for grazing and crops. There’s only so much land. If I’m on it, you’re off. That’s the world’s shortest history of warfare, and the world’s shortest history of class conflict, serfdom, slavery, nationalism, racism, and genocide.

Zero-sum thinking is a name for envy. Ovid, in his Metamorphoses, gives an apt description of the “House of Envy” (as a poet in that most zero sum of political systems, the Roman empire, might): “Envy within, busy at the meal of snake’s flesh … her tongue dripped venom. Only the sight of suffering could bring a smile to her lips. She never knew the comfort of sleep, but … looked with dismay on men’s good fortune … She could hardly refrain from weeping when she saw no cause for tears.” I didn’t know Hillary Clinton’s involvement in politics dated back to the reign of Augustus.

Then one day the idea of zero sum wasn’t true. We see its falsehood being revealed by population growth during the late Middle Ages in Europe and India and China (with time-outs for Black Death, massacring invasions, and the Thirty Years’ War). The industrial revolution would further this population trend, but the original human anti-Malthusianism doesn’t seem to have been the result of science or invention. Adam Smith thought the cause was simple expansion of trade, giving farmers a motive to grow more food than was needed just for eating, reseeding, and the rats.

By now there shouldn’t be a zero-sum thought left in our heads. We should be free of all of zero sum’s begrudgings. We know we can make more of everything. Energy, to name one. When did our vital supply of lamp-lighting whale oil run out? We didn’t notice because we were too busy inventing kerosene and electricity.

Once again India and China (Europe not so much) are showing the way with the vast expansions of their economies. We can bake more pizza (or naan, as the case may be). We can clone more cows. We can raise more plants (under grow lights in the closets of our off-campus apartments). There’s even additional beachfront property on its way, thanks to climate change and seaside development in Greenland. Celebrity offers the ultimate disproof of zero sum. The amount of celebrity was always limited by the need for something to celebrate. Click through your cable channels. Not now.

But there is one field of endeavor where zero sum remains the awful truth: politics. Even in the most free and democratic country politics is about power. There’s a fixed quantity of power because there’s a fixed quantity of me. Power you have over me is power I lose to you. And political power is different from other power because political systems are different from other social systems. A political system has the legal monopoly on deadly force. We’re all involved in a variety of social systems, such as that bunch of social snobs with their system of blackballing us at the country club. They’re allowed to ban us from the tees but they aren’t allowed to pick us off with sniper fire from their clubhouse bar. Governments can. Nothing sums up zero sum like death.

Because government is zero sum there aren’t two congressmen wedging their fat butts into the same seat in the House of Representatives. We don’t have 300 million Supreme Court justices telling nine old Washington shysters in black bathrobes whether they’ll get a lawyer at Gitmo. The chiefs of the Joint Chiefs of Staff aren’t all commander in chiefs commanding “Forward March!” to one another until they collide in a group hug.

Political power is awful, and power is awful anyway. Lord Acton, one of nineteenth-century Britain’s great defenders of liberty, wrote, “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” This was in a letter to Anglican Bishop Mandell Creighton, and the subject was papal infallibility (something Acton, a devout Catholic, argued against at the First Vatican Council). If power can do the likes of that to the Holy Father in Rome, just think what it’s done to Harry Reid.

We have to be careful about giving power to people—for their own sake, among every other reason. We won’t get our power back easily. And when we try to get our power back it isn’t pretty: Washington at Valley Forge, Paris during the Reign of Terror, the czar’s family in Yekaterinburg.

Nonetheless we are continually tempted to confer power on government—to delegate our power (as some would have it), to alienate our power (as Jefferson would have been more likely to say). And it’s not only a desire to escape from our responsibilities that tempts us. The American government is a huge tool, a formidable engine, mighty in its operation and nearly irresistible in its movement (never mind that it doesn’t know where it’s going). The temptation is to use a tool like this when something needs fixing. Whether the tool suits the task isn’t a question we always ask ourselves, as those of us who received Home Depot gift certificates for Father’s Day can attest. Maybe we shouldn’t change the battery in our wristwatch with the electric drill. But what if it’s a cordless DeWalt with a ⅜-inch chuck and fifty different bits?

Or, to put the case differently, the government is a rottweiler ready to be unleashed on your problems. And you’ve stuffed raw meat down the front of your pants.

One method of being careful with government power is to think about our messy government the way we think about our messy personal lives. There are furious ex-spouses, bitter former lovers, and various outstanding child support judgments. We don’t want too much of this in one place, which is why we moved to Phoenix.

America’s founding fathers knew enough about messy personal lives to make sure that the chief concerns of the Constitutional Convention were a federalist decentralization of power and a system by which each branch of government would check the other branches of government and balance their power with power of its own. What if all the ex-spouses, former lovers, and kids whose school fees we’re supposed to be paying become friends and get the same lawyer? America’s founding fathers would have rather moved to Phoenix than let this happen.

It is a good idea for as much government power as possible to be distributed to the smallest possible units of government—the cities, towns, townships, and counties that are scattered all over the United States plus those scattered states themselves. John Sununu, former governor of New Hampshire and chief of staff to President George H. W. Bush, is a cantankerous and truthful man. He’s also an engineer. He compares reliance on local government to a goal of mechanical engineering: short control loops. The hot and cold faucets in your shower are a short control loop. If, instead of being located in the shower stall, those hot and cold faucets were in the basement, that would be a long control loop. This is not to say that a short control loop always works. You may be out of hot water. But it’s better to stand in the shower fiddling with a useless faucet than to march naked and dripping through the house, amazing the children and shocking the cleaning lady, down two flights of stairs into the grungy basement, and fiddle with a useless faucet there.

If our neighbor on the local sewer commission votes to raise our sewer rates, we can go next door and yell at him or stuff a potato up the tailpipe of his car. Stuffing a potato up the tailpipe of the limousine of the president of the United States is a federal crime, or they’ll make it one if I try.

Despite the clear and evident sense of the short control loop argument we are deaf to it. When something’s wrong we don’t consult the sewer commissioner next door, even if what’s wrong is backed-up sewage. We go straight to Washington and, bypassing even the House and the Senate, expect the president himself to take time off from trying to get his limo started and come over to our house with a plunger.

We do this not just because we’re morons but because federal government in the United States is more efficient, less corrupt, and harder-working than state and local governments. Illinois. Say no more.

The federal government attracts the best talents in administration, legislation, jurisprudence, and bureaucracy. And those talents are exercised under the greatest scrutiny because the news media pay attention to the federal government. All this makes for a good thing. Of its kind. In the shark tank the juiciest bait attracts the biggest sharks. If that juicy bait happens to be something interesting, such as we the drowning taxpayers, attention will be paid.

The only effective way to keep power decentralized is by making sure our society provides ungovernmental ways of being powerful. The best talents should be offered bait in places other than Washington. Let the good and the great flounce around in the arts, spout pious bilge from pulpits, fill the minds of the young with drivel at great universities, spread patronizing smarm through charitable organizations, and rob all comers in business. Just one ready, necessary thing is needed to set the hook in this lure of decentralization. Thank God for money. And whenever we meet a rich person, however loathsome, we should be sure to say, “Thanks! The disgusting fact of your existence helps spread the manure of life around and keeps it from piling up in one spot, under the Capitol dome.”

Political power, however, remains the most powerful of powers, so people will continue to be drawn to it. What kind of people we know too well. The politician’s personality has been brilliantly described.

A pervasive pattern of grandiosity (in fantasy or behavior), need for admiration … beginning by early adulthood … as indicated by five (or more) of the following:

1. has grandiose sense of self-importance (e.g., exaggerates achievements and talents, expects to be recognized as superior without commensurate achievements)

2. is preoccupied with fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance

3. believes that he or she is “special” and unique and can only be understood by, or should associate with, other special or high-status people (or institutions)

4. requires excessive admiration

5. has a sense of entitlement, i.e., unreasonable expectations of especially favorable treatment or automatic compliance with his or her expectations

6. is interpersonally exploitative, i.e., takes advantage of others to achieve his or her ends

7. lacks empathy: is unwilling to recognize or identify with the feelings and needs of others

8. is often envious of others or believes that others are envious of him or her

9. shows arrogant, haughty behaviors or attitudes

The authors of the above passage had no idea they were writing about politics. They thought they were writing about mental illness. This perceptive analysis of politicians appears on page 717 of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Medical Disorders, fourth edition, under the heading “Diagnostic Criteria for Narcissistic Personality Disorder.”

The only thing in the shrinks’ notes that might seem odd to a voter is “lack of empathy.” Every politician is always telling us how much sympathy, understanding, and fellowship he or she has with us and how deeply he or she is moved by our hopes, our dreams, and our fears. About such too much protestation, Hamlet’s mother—no mean politician herself—has an oft-quoted line.

There is an enormously powerful machine that with one wrong turn can kill us all and it’s being run by crazy people. What are the chances this will turn out well?

In the meantime it’s costing us a fortune. Milton and Rose Friedman, in their seminal work about liberty and market freedoms, Free to Choose, showed why government is so expensive. The Friedmans devised what in logic is called a “truth table” to show that there are, logically, only four categories of spending. The table looks like this:

Category I is you spending your money on yourself. Let’s take cars as an example of something to spend on and me as an example of someone doing the spending. I have a splendid 1990 Porsche 911—a leftover from my carefree bachelor days—that I got a great deal on, buying it almost new from a dentist who scared himself and bought a Lexus Coupe instead. When you spend your money on yourself you get—as nearly as you can—exactly what you want and you bargain as hard as you can for it.

In Category II, when you’re spending your money on someone else, you still bargain hard. But you’re not quite as concerned about getting exactly what’s wanted. Although I’m sure my wife is very fond of the Geo Tracker I bought for her and the kids.

You spend someone else’s money on yourself in Category III, and I’m on the fence between the Aston Martin DBS coupe that goes for close to $300,000 and letting “someone else” off easy with an Alfa Romeo 8C Competizione spider convertible, a steal at $230,000.

With Category IV you’re not involved at all. It’s not your money and nothing’s in it for you. So it might as well be billions spent on jack shit or, as the government called it, “Cash for Clunkers.”

All government spending is done in Category IV.

There are very few excuses for allowing goods and services to be allocated by political means unless you’re trying to get something that isn’t yours. And what you get is a Geo Tracker. That’s one Geo Tracker for you versus innumerable reasons for the rest of us to prevent you from allocating goods and services by political means. Make that innumerable plus three.

1. Concentrated benefits and diffuse costs.

2. Invisible opportunities.

3. Committee Brain.

One of the things that allows us to be eaten up by our politics is that we are eaten very slowly, one political bug bite at a time. If we were being eaten by a boa constrictor or Kim Jong Il we’d notice. But in a democracy it takes years for us to wake up and say, as Ronald Reagan so memorably said in the 1942 movie Kings Row, “Where’s the rest of me?” Not until almost forty years later, when Reagan was running for president, did we taxpayers finally come to our senses and ask the same question about our paychecks.

The first secret of our obliviousness to being swallowed is what’s called “diffuse costs.” A government idiocy may be expensive, but the expense is spread so broadly that none of us feels the nip of that expense very hard. For instance, let’s take a government idiocy that’s quite expensive and, furthermore, obviously and evidently useless to the nation, and which doesn’t even have any political support. Joe Biden. Joe Biden costs us $227,300 a year in salary plus $90,000 for official entertainment expenses. (O’Doul’s, because somebody has to keep a clear head during those White House Beer Summits.) Then there are the tens of thousands spent on around-the-clock White House staffers trying to keep Joe Biden’s mouth shut and more tens of thousands for shoe shines, black neckties, and Air Force 2 fuel when unimportant foreign leaders die, and at least $20 worth of Secret Service protection. We’ll round it off and take a guess and say that Joe Biden costs us $600,000 a year. But there are 300 million of us. Yes, Joe is a complete waste of two-tenths of a cent, but who cares?

Joe does. That is the “concentrated benefits” part of “concentrated benefits and diffuse costs.” The two-tenths of a cent means nothing to us, but it’s everything in the world to Joe Biden who will bear any burden, meet any hardship, pay any price (well, no, we’ll pay the price), even go on Bill O’Reilly to remain one and a half heartbeats from the presidency. (The half a heartbeat is the time it will take Nancy Pelosi to wring his neck and become president herself.) And so it goes with other government idiocies even more expensive than Joe such as AIG and Homeland Security.

The expense of politics wouldn’t matter so much if it weren’t for the opportunities that are destroyed by this spending. Money that’s poured down rat holes can’t be used to pay the Pied Piper. (Not that the government of Hamelin town did pay the Pied Piper.) These destroyed opportunities—or “opportunity costs,” as economists call them—are the flip side of zero-sum. It is a source of wickedness to believe that the world contains a fixed amount of resources. Paradoxically, it is a source of wickedness to forget that the world does contain a fixed amount of resources, at any given moment. The amount of resources is infinitely expandable, but in order to expand it we have to spend the resources we currently have on something other than Joe Biden.

Because our opportunities are lost—so lost they never got anywhere near us—it’s easy and maybe comforting to forget about them. These opportunities are certainly invisible to politicians. They don’t see the businesses that weren’t started, the innovations that weren’t pursued, the charitable donations that weren’t made, and the beer I didn’t drink because a jerk professor and a college-town cop (talk about a fight I don’t have a dog in) drank it in the White House backyard.

Meanwhile politicians work themselves into a lather of rationalization about the benefits of government spending. In this they are aided by the more vile kinds of economists such as Paul Krugman and the late John Kenneth Galbraith. Using liberal political-economic reasoning I can prove … anything. I can prove that shooting convenience store clerks stimulates the economy.

Jobs are created in the high-paying domestic manufacturing sector at gun and ammunition factories. Additional emergency medical technicians, security guards, health care providers, and morticians are hired. The unemployment rate is lowered as job seekers fill new openings on convenience store night shifts. And money stolen from convenience store cash registers stimulates the economy where stimulus is most needed, in low-income neighborhoods where the people who shoot convenience store clerks go to buy their crack.

I am simply flabbergasted that the Democratic majority in the House and Senate isn’t smoking crack and shooting convenience store clerks this very minute, considering all the good it does.

The expense of politics is bad, the political destruction of opportunities is very bad, but nothing is as dreadful as the brain of a politician.

Ha. Ha. Ha. What brain? Alas, it’s worse than a joke. Taken one by one, politicians are of dull-normal intelligence. But when you put politicians together in governments you get committees. In Congress they even come right out and call the committees committees.

We’ve all been on committees. We know what happens to intelligence and common sense when a person becomes a committee member—Committee Brain.

You live in a neighborhood with a playground. The kids in the neighborhood would like to play tetherball but the playground has no tetherball pole. A committee is formed to raise funds for tetherball: Committee to Raise Funds for Tetherball, CRFT.

CRFT is started by a group of pleasant, enthusiastic, public-spirited neighbors. The minute any of these neighbors becomes a member of CRFT he or she will begin to express his or her pleasant, enthusiastic public spirit by turning into one of the following.

The Martinet

We have to draw up a charter and form a nonprofit corporation with a chairman, a president, vice president, secretary, treasurer, development officer, and human resources executive. And the tetherball pole has to be exactly nine meters high, in accordance with North American Amateur Tetherball Association rules.

The Dog in the Manger

We need to get permission from the County Zoning Board, the City Council, the Parks Department, and adjacent landowners who may complain about tetherball noise. That part of the playground is too damp for tetherball. It might be federally protected wetlands. We can’t do any fund-raising without advertising. We can’t advertise without raising funds. The kids would rather have a tennis court.

The Person Who Is Stupid Even by Committee Brain Standards

So the rope, like, has a ball on it?

The Worrier

Padded pole, breakaway tether, a lightweight foam ball, and ban on playing after dark or when visibility is poor and when the sun is shining, to avoid UV ray skin cancer damage. The kids should wear helmets and kneepads and safety belts.

The Person with Ideas

If we call ourselves the “Committee to Raise American Funds for Tetherball—Yeah!” we can use the acronym CRAFTY. Let’s set up a challenge grant to erect a second tetherball pole in the inner city. “Midnight Tetherball” could be an alternative to crime for deprived youth. We can also promote tetherball as a way to combat child obesity, which would make us eligible for funding from the Gates Foundation. We’ll have a tetherball league—no, three—Adults, Juniors, and Tether Tots. This could be a great Title IX thing. If our daughters are varsity-level tetherball players they’ll get into Yale.

The Person with Ideas, None of Which Has Anything to Do with Tetherball

Is the tether biodegradable? Is the pole made from recycled materials? Many playground balls are manufactured in third world countries using exploitative child labor. Let’s be sure to utilize organic fertilizer and indigenous plant species when seeding the tetherball play area.

The Bossy Person

Who says the same thing as everyone else on the committee but louder.

The Person Who Won’t Shut Up

Who says the same thing as everyone else on the committee but more often.

The Person Who Won’t Show Up

Unless his or her vote is crucial, in which case he or she shows up and votes the wrong way.

You

You actually do all the work and call forty people and ask them each to donate $20, and half of them do, and you raise the $400 needed, only to find out you need $400,000 because the House of Representatives’ Economic and Educational Opportunities Committee’s Select Committee on Opportunities in Physical Education’s Subcommittee on Americans with Disabilities Act Compliance requires all tetherballs to be wheelchair-accessible no matter how high the tetherballs fly in the air.

Given the complete dominance of politics by Committee Brain, the wonder is that anything gets done, and the horror is that it does. What government accomplishes is what you’d expect from a committee. “A camel is a horse designed by a committee” is a saying that couldn’t be more wrong. A camel is a seeing-eye dog designed by a committee and available free with government grants to people who can see perfectly well but can’t walk.

Yet committees are ancient and ubiquitous in our civilization. Moses goes to a business conference with God and the next thing you know, Exodus 32:1, “the people gathered themselves together.” And someone says, “All in favor of worshipping a golden calf …”

Same thing in the Roman Senate: “All in favor of relinquishing power to Caesar, then stabbing him …”

And again in the boardrooms of Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, and Fannie Mae: “All in favor of investing in loans to people who made loans to people who made loans to people with houses that aren’t worth pissing on if they catch fire …”

Committees persist although their decisions are almost invariably stupid. Therefore committees must provide some value to our civilization with their stupidity. And they do. In fact it could be suggested that our freedoms find their surest protection in stupidity.

We owe the thought to Lord Brougham, another of nineteenth-century Britain’s great defenders of liberty. As Lord Chancellor, Brougham led the fights in Parliament that would abolish slavery in 1833 and pass the Reform Bill of 1832 broadening the electorate and making seats in Parliament more nearly representational. Brougham (who, incidentally, had a style of fancy carriage named after him, set the fashion for going to the Riviera, and became himself quite stupid later in life) said, “All we see about us, Kings, Lords, and Commons, the whole machinery of the State, all the apparatus of the system, and its varied workings, end in simply bringing twelve good men into a box.”

In other words, what makes and keeps us free is a committee—the jury. Governments have the legal monopoly on deadly force, and, in a free country, the thing that prevents the government from forcing us into prison or onto the lethal injection gurney any time it likes is the need for a jury verdict. Our government cannot inflict any punishment or penalty upon us unless what we have done is so obviously wrong and outrageously bad that even a feebleminded, asinine, obtuse, muddled, stubborn, and silly committee, which never agrees on anything, agrees.