Pro-government? Anti-government?

I think that Oliver Willis is a very smart guy. I read his blog every day and I agree with some of what he has to say (which is a pretty good track record for anybody). However, I don’t think that the solution to the problems that face the Republic can be solved by putting a bunch of smart guys in a room and locking to the door until they come up with the Big Solutions.

And I certainly don’t believe that Democrats are “reflexively anti-government”.

There are lots of reasons that some problems are hard enough to solve that nobody has come up with a solution yet. Some problems are just insoluble. Some are insoluble within the constraints that have been imposed on them. And some are just wicked problems—problems for which the very process of solving the problem changes the definition of the problem. Most really important issues that face us are (like health care, global warming, or world hunger) probably wicked problems.

I think that government is useful and necessary—IMO anarcho-capitalists are mostly just very young and don’t yet realize that the market (which they like) wouldn’t endure for an afternoon without government (which they don’t).

I think the Founding Fathers (whom Oliver cites approvingly) are probably a pretty good example of what government is about. Stop thinking about James Madison and Ben Franklin and Alexander Hamilton. These guys were ruthless self-promoters and while brilliant without any doubt they didn’t write the Constitution without assistance their own puffery notwithstanding. Think rather of Pierce Butler and William Few and Thomas Fitzsimmons. While Madison and Franklin were thinking up the Big Ideas for all we know William Few was yelling “Hey! Postal roads! Don’t forget that we’ve got to have postal roads!” Or “Doesn’t the new government have to mint money?” Or maybe just “Is it time for lunch? Why doesn’t this place have air conditioning?”

While I don’t see those who look towards government for solutions as Stalininst collectivists who long to turn the country into an enormous ant-hill, I don’t see our Congressmen and Senators as wise and all-knowing demigods whose brilliance is being thwarted by the intransigence of anti-government cranks, either. I see the House of Representatives and the Senate as local school boards writ large—basically the same motivations and abilities just a larger budget and, consequently, a much more inflated sense of self-importance.

2 comments… add one
  • John Link

    “I see the House of Representatives and the Senate as local school boards writ large—basically the same motivations and abilities just a larger budget and, consequently, a much more inflated sense of self-importance.” Yeah, and war is terrorism with a bigger budget”

  • Nonsense, John. Terrorism knows no limits other than the egos of its perpetrators. War is awful but making an equivalence between it and terrorism is a serious error. The inability to distinguish between categories of evil is the inability to distinguish between good and evil.

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