Everyone
hates the government, but there are times when every faction opposed to
it comes vigorously to its defence, for different reasons. What's the
reason for this love/hate relationship, and is there a solution for
re-forming government in a way that might make everyone (other than
government exploiters) happy?
Conservatives and progressives each have a different beef with
government. Social conservatives like laws that reinforce their
personal values, and want government to uphold such laws and
enforcement agencies to enforce them. But ultimately they believe that
if families and communities did the job of instilling such values in
people, and disciplining those who violated them, there would be little
need for government to step in and do so. Government is needed to act
when those of weak and flawed moral character fail to do so, and are
not reprimanded by their peers for doing so.
Economic conservatives believe in the untrammeled free market, and
think that, if the government would just butt out, the economic system
would regulate itself in the collective interest. Those who are also
social conservatives accept that government is needed to deal with
moral failings, while those who are true libertarians, like anarchists
at the opposite end of the political spectrum, would like government to
devolve its authority to the family or the community i.e. to groups who
are personally and directly affected by the decisions they make, and
personally and directly responsible to those same family and community
members for those decisions. It's pretty hard to make a bad decision
when everyone affected is watching you make it and holding you
accountable for it, with the right to override you if you screw up.
Libertarians see a need for government only in times of great crisis,
and see it abolishing itself as soon as that minimum intervention is
complete.
Progressives see imbalances and abuses of power and wealth as
inevitable, and see a role of government to rebalance power and wealth
and to help those who are simply unable to help themselves. They are,
for the most part, opposed to government playing a moral role in
society, though they generally recognize that laws are needed to
control those who harm others.
Everyone acknowledges that government brings with it bureaucracy and
the risk of abuse of power, and most agree that the bigger government
gets the more prone it is to these problems, though small, local
governments and power authorities can also abuse power, and sometimes
need oversight from larger governments to rein in their excesses.
In short, the attitudes of these four groups towards government and regulation are as follows:
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Government & Regulation are needed to:
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But are not needed to:
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Social Conservatives
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Act when those of weak/flawed moral character fail to do so.
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Regulate people of 'good' character.
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Economic Conservatives
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Act when those of weak/flawed moral character fail to do so. |
Regulate economic activity otherwise.
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Libertarians/Anarchists
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Act only in times of great crisis when social order breaks down.
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Regulate people in normal times.
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Progressives
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Rebalance power and help those who cannot help themselves.
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Regulate people in matters of morality unless they harm others
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Each group has a compelling argument in theory.
The differences lie in how each group sees the real world. The flaw in
the social conservatives' argument is that what is 'weak or flawed
moral behaviour' and 'good' character is not something everyone can
agree upon. The flaw in the economic conservatives' argument is that we
have never had a 'free' market or anything vaguely like it, and unless
power imbalances could be magically and instantly eradicated we could
never hope to eliminate all the deformities (exchange regulations,
subsidies, price-fixing, government interference, patronage,
large-scale fraud and corruption) that prevent the market from
operating as it ideally should. The flaw in the libertarians' and
anarchists' argument is the belief that most people at the community
level have the knowledge and skill to self-manage, that inequalities
between different communities can be eliminated, that the 'small-town
Southern sheriff' syndrome (local abuse of power by psychopaths) can be
solved locally, and that large governments will ever be inclined to
devolve their authority or abolish themselves in non-crisis times. The
flaw in the progressives' argument is that large social organizations
can effectively rebalance wealth and power, and help those who cannot
help themselves, efficiently, effectively and equitably, and without
wasting much of the resources they are allocated in bureaucracy and
administration.
What it all comes down to is that we cannot trust people with power and
wealth not to abuse it, and it rein it in through government and
regulation we need to give the government and regulation sufficient
power and wealth to combat it. Many studies have shown that the rate of
lawlessness, the degree of complexity and severity of laws, and the
rate of incarceration, correlate most highly with the degree of inequality of wealth and power
in any society -- community, state or nation. Large areas that are
uniformly wealthy or poor are peaceful and law-abiding. It is only
where tremendous wealth and power, and tremendous (relative) poverty
and powerlessness exist in close proximity, that law and order is the
number one issue in the minds of the people. In today's global village,
with news of such inequality ubiquitous, it is not surprising to see a
surge in violence as the psychological distance between rich and poor
shrinks just as the economic gap between them is rising to
unprecedented levels.
So we cannot hope to do away with (the need for) government until we
find some non-regulatory (using neither laws nor markets) to eliminate
the vast inequities in our world and in our countries. In other words,
neither politics nor economics offers us a solution to the inequality
that underlies most of the problems that our world faces today. In
fact, politics and economics actually contribute to these problems.
What is needed is a social
solution -- one that brings together people of all social and economic
strata with some of the world's greatest thinkers, artists, scientists,
philosophers, technologists, historians, and others, to develop new
collaborative actions that do not depend on our hopelessly flawed and
broken political and economic systems, but depend instead on our
collective wisdom, our shared knowledge and understanding of how to
live, and how to create a better world, and which circumvent politics,
economics and the law entirely. We have that collective wisdom. What we
need are some bold new ways to gather it, galvanize it, and make it
happen.
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MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
