Can the Rampaging Leviathan Be Stopped or Slowed?

Nov 2, 2009

Can the Rampaging Leviathan Be Stopped or Slowed?
By Robert Higgs

In a recent commentary titled “Diagnostics and Therapeutics in Political Economy,” I endeavored to show that an analytical understanding of past growth in the government’s size, scope, and power does not permit us to prescribe effective means of stopping or slowing this growth, particularly any simple “silver bullet” remedy, and I specifically disclaimed any personal knowledge of “what is to be done” toward this end. Responses to this commentary, some of them from keenly intelligent friends of mine who insist that diagnostics and therapeutics must be firmly linked, lead me to believe that I did not make myself sufficiently clear.

One respondent wrote, “Higgs must be speaking with tongue in cheek, for a man of his intellect simply must have a few solutions at least.” Well, yes, on one level, I have many “solutions” to propose. The problem comes when we ponder why I’ve just put quotation marks around the word solutions. The reason pertains to the links that connect my understanding of why government has grown with measures that might be taken to stop or slow its ongoing growth.

My understanding of the process by which government has grown in the United States and many other countries since the late nineteenth century is not easy for me to summarize briefly. It involves (1) a structural-ideological-political process operating in a persistent manner to produce long-term trends, (2) a crisis-ideological-political process operating during a series of discrete episodes of “national emergency,” and (3) interactions between these two processes, which should not be understood as independent of one another, but as identifiable aspects of the single herky-jerky historical evolution ― sometimes regular, sometimes erratic ― of a politico-economic order. One upshot of this complex process might be seen if we were to examine a series of “snapshots” at, say, thirty-year intervals. Each snapshot would show us a society with a different composition of economic activities, production techniques, occupations, demographic attributes, and so forth, a different composition of ideological identifications, understandings, and loyalties, and a different configuration of political leanings, organizations, and institutions reflecting these structural and ideological differences. To oversimplify, we might say that the overall process creates ― usually gradually, but occasionally abruptly ― a changing set of “vested interests” among the population, but in this characterization we would have to interpret the idea of vested interests more broadly than usual, so that it includes not only people’s interests in pecuniary payoffs, but also their interests in ideological outcomes of various sorts. (My views in this area have been developed in a series of personal engagements [as a teacher, consultant in regulatory proceedings, and expert witness in legal proceedings] and in a series of research efforts, the most prominent results of which are reported in my books Crisis and Leviathan, Against Leviathan, Depression, War, and Cold War, and Neither Liberty Nor Safety, to which the reader is referred for a more detailed account of my views on this matter, among others.)

Now, with this rather desperately compressed vision of the complex process by which the government has grown as our background, let us return to my “solutions,” that is, to my proposals for stopping or slowing further growth of government. In doing so, however, we must recognize that political “solutions” that clash strongly with the currently prevailing array of vested interests (broadly construed) probably cannot be implemented. For me to suppose otherwise would be inconsistent, because doing so would be tantamount to rejection of my own interpretation of how those interests came into being in the course of the historical process just outlined. At least within somewhat flexible limits, a society’s socio-economic structure, ideological postures, and political institutions must cohere. At a particular point in time, many conceivable (and in my view desirable) political reforms are not feasible.

At the moment, many people are enamored of the solution that calls for abolition of the Federal Reserve System. I certainly agree that the Fed has played an integral (but not an indispensable) role in the growth of government in the United States since 1913. But once one has demanded “abolish the Fed” and subsequently found that it is still in operation, what does one do?

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