Machan's Musings - Exploiting Disasters
by Tibor R. Machan
In the beginning of the American republic, there was a debate between the Hamiltonians and Jeffersonians. Neither side was advancing a fully consistent, coherent vision of politics for America but, in the main, Hamiltonians defended the idea of a strong federal government, while Jefferson’s supporters argued for limited and mainly local government. The debate has never completely ended, although Hamiltonians triumphed when it comes to how America evolved.
In our day there is little mainstream opposition to the Hamiltonian big government vision. Both parties champion it, differing only on which aspects of society each would like to have government control more fully, more aggressively. Conservatives focus mainly on shaping our souls—they want to bring church and state closer together, they demand that religious teaching be spread across the land, while liberals are primarily interested in having government control the economy, raise minimum wages, regulate corporations, and tax and spend to their heart’s content. Don’t kid yourself—each side embraces aggressive moralizing to the core.
In times of emergencies the fact that both the liberals and the conservatives have embraced big government—not only in terms of its size and cost but even more importantly regarding its scope of power—comes across most clearly. The only minor dispute between these two factions concerns which level of government should be most involved, state or federal. Conservatives prefer that state governments wield the greater power and carry the greater burden, while liberals champion unrestrained federal involvement.
The fact that neither alternative is working well, no matter what the crisis happens to be—natural, like Katrina and Rita, or man-made, such as terrorism—does not bother either side too much. Sure, there are some who sound alarms about excessivegovernment power, say, when it comes to sacrificing civil liberties in the war on terror or, on the other side, when massive and reckless federal spending is contemplated as a remedy for whatever ails the country. But aside from such details, the consensus tends to be that when people face big trouble, the way to go is with big government.
The disaster at the Gulf of Mexico, and the visual imagery that millions of us received from the region, has given the Hamiltonians a considerable opportunity to bolster their case. As an example, one need but read Michael Ignatieff, Carr professor of human rights at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, in the September 25th issue of The New York Times Magazine. To bolster his ongoing support for big, unlimited federal government, Ignatieff penned "The Broken Contract," a piece in which he propounds the notion that the American people have entered into a contract which requires that they be protected by government from all hazards and dangers and crisis. As he puts the point,
"[The contract’s] basic term is protection: helping citizens to protect their families and possessions from forces beyond their control. Let's not suppose this contract is uncontroversial. American politics is a furious argument about what should be in the contract and what shouldn't be. But there is enough agreement, most of the time, about what the contract contains for America to hold together as a political community. When disasters strike, they test whether the contract is respected in a citizen's hour of need. When the levees broke, the contract of American citizenship failed."
Actually, of course, no such contract was ever ratified. In the American political tradition, if any kind of contract between the citizens and their government exists, it involves the very limited terms of receiving protection for one’s basic rights. As stated in the Declaration of Independence, where this political vision is sketched, it is "to secure these rights [that] governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed."
This is unambiguously put—governments exist to protect our rights, not to protect us "from forces beyond our control." In other words, American government wasn’t conceived as our doctor, dentist, tree surgeon, hurricane fighter, flood preventer, and all the various professionals whom we hire when "forces beyond our control" threaten or invade our lives. American government exists to fight criminals, not nature.
It should be simple to understand this. Government is made up of politicians and bureaucrats, not professionals who know how to handle all the varieties of disasters that we can encounter in life. Whenever government extends itself to attempt to cope with these adversities, all that really happens is that it grows by leaps and bounds. (The best scholarly work on this is Robert Higgs’ Crisis and Leviathan [Oxford University Press, 1987].)
Yet, of course, even as academic cheerleaders of big government like Michael Ignatieff admit outright that government failed to manage this latest disaster, as it has in innumerable other cases, they also use the disaster to call for more and more government.
Instead, they ought to call for taking government out of the picture and acclimating all of us to the simple and vital fact that disasters are best managed with paid professionals, ones who would be prepared and step up to the plate, if only government didn’t pretend to be there for us, feigning "to protect [our] families and possessions from forces beyond our control."
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