© Charles D. Hayes
Politically, today’s cry for small
government has more to do with reducing government power than its size. Granted,
without accountability, any agency, public or private, can balloon beyond its
reason for existence. But try to imagine this: big oil, big banks, big cyber
companies, big finance, big pharmaceutical, big retail, big transportation, big
aviation, big utilities, big insurance, big lobbyists, big tobacco, big prison
industry, big media and a big military industrial complex overseen by a little government.
To the ideological right, this is heaven
on Earth. To the working men and women in America, this is a quicker road to
serfdom than anything that economist F. A. Hayek could have conjured up — a land
of Goliaths and a population of Davids, where wages, pressured by global corporations,
experience free-fall.
Put another way, this kind of dream
portends a 21st century with corporate fiefdoms and an ever-growing number of
consumer-serfs. It frees up the power of the already powerful. Worse still, government
collusion with big business that transfers public wealth to private executives,
in what Naomi Klein calls corporatism,
erases all hope for a better future for average Americans. The feudalism of the
Middle Ages can’t really be that much different from what could become of
America if the growth of income inequality continues to escalate.
To her credit, novelist Ayn Rand warned
against government complicity with big business. Too bad she didn’t know enough
about human nature to realize that her virtuous fictional character John Galt is
a creature that does not exist in the real world of business.
All John Galt pretenders are causalities
to vice or corruption of one kind or another. That’s why we need a government that’s
accountable to the people and has enough muscle to deal with giants without
being intimidated or stomped into submission.
It is a well-accepted premise that pure
communism and pure socialism are unworkable ideologies. But so is pure capitalism.
The wants, needs, temperaments, talents, beliefs and traditions of human beings
with diverse backgrounds require an economic system calibrated to sustain a
high quality of life for all citizens, not just a few super-needy individuals
following a myopic ideology.
Hayek maintained that government involvement
in the economy would lead to serfdom. Indeed, corporatism does the trick. But
so will capitalists accountable only to markets that they create and control.
There are many roads to serfdom but none quicker than the thoroughfares run by
international corporations shadowed by small, ineffectual governments.
A few years ago, Dutch economist Jan Pen
asked us to imagine people’s height as being proportional to their income, making
average income equal to average height. He asked us to picture everyone in
America walking by us in one hour’s time in ascending order of their income.
In the first several minutes of the
procession, the passersby would be invisible. It would take 45 minutes before
people of today’s normal height would appear. Then, with six minutes to go,
giants would begin to pass by. And near the end, these individuals would be
more than two miles tall. Of course, that was some time ago. Today the last few
would likely be much taller.
A close reading of American history shows
beyond a doubt that our health as a nation is dependent in large part on a
vibrant middle class. Extreme inequality severely weakens our economic
foundation.
The incessant roar to reduce the size of
government has so oversimplified the politics of the matter that few people
even give the issue much thought. It’s simply accepted as fact by a growing
number of people that all of the world’s ills are due to big government, end of
story.
Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine and Henry
David Thoreau are often mentioned in connection with the assertion that “the
government that governs best is the government that governs least.” This
declaration is no doubt true. But it also has less to do with the size of
government than with efficiency and effectiveness.
All three of these men were strong
advocates for effective government, and after making the statement above,
Thoreau clarified that his aspirations were not necessarily for making
government small but rather for bringing about better government. We would be
well advised to heed his wisdom. Instead of continuously ranting about the need
for small government, we must decide, once and for all, what we expect from
government and then make sure we get it.
Capitalism is an extremely powerful
system, so much so that it cannot be sustained without safeguards. To make America
safe for “creative destruction” requires responsible citizens and the
collective authority to see that we are not overrun by giants accountable to no
one but themselves. Our anthem is “We the people,” not we the serfs.
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