Matt Yglesias has a nice takedown of public choice theory on his blog today:
For starters, even in the nightwatchman state we still have the nightwatchmen. We’re keeping the armed men, the dungeons, the handcuffs, the tanks, and the nuclear missiles. These — rather than, say, the librarians — are the really dangerous part of big government. If you look at a really poorly governed place (Congo, say) the problem isn’t that the people in charge of regulating air pollution aren’t doing their jobs correctly. The problem is either that the men with the guns and dungeons are corrupt, or else that they’re incapable of protecting citizens from other predatory gangs of men with guns, or some combination of the two. When I was in Russia, I was robbed by policemen on several occasions under the pretense of fining me for having my visa out of order, and upon leaving the airport security guards stole all my cash. In the United States, neither of those things has ever happened to me. The existence of the rule of law and secure property rights is, where it exists, a triumph of public integrity against the assumption of cynicism.
The observation that malgovernment is a major source of human ills is quite correct, but embracing fatalism about it only exacerbates the problem. What’s needed are efforts to push societies in the direction of taking honor and civic obligation more seriously, not less so. You want politicians and civil servants to feel worse, not better about behaving cynically…
From a theory perspective, it’s important to understand how this kind of argument relates to claims about the “state of nature” and the institution of organized government. A lot of modern and contemporary political philosophy (from Hobbes and Locke to Nozick and Rawles) takes as a basic premise the notion of a “state of nature.” Hobbes famously described the state of nature as a pre-social phase of human existence, characterized by nasty, brutish, and near-constant warfare and injustice. Philosophers who latch on to this notion, whether literally or hypothetically, will not give you the proper historical context for Hobbes’ description, however; he was actually writing, whether he knew it or not, about the horrors of the English Civil War. That is, the imagery he was describing was not of a pre-society, but of a society that had fallen into horrendous disrepair.
Perhaps history and philosophy are not to be mixed, but in my mind the failure to properly consider this historical context has perverted many works of political theory that have treated the “state of nature” as an intelligible, if hypothetical, concept. In my mind, it is not intelligible — man has never been outside or prior to society, and the periods of brutish warfare and injustice that we have witnessed throughout history have had a lot more to do with the failures of society than with the absence of society.
Which brings us back to libertarianism, and the unintelligibility of embracing a stance of fatalism about malgovernment. The way to repair malgovernment — and its attendant ills — is to repair it, not disband it. But, as Yglesias suggests, there is a certain level of self-interest that drives advocates of strong libertarianism. Such people are generally the sort of folks who feel that they don’t really need society — that they are hardworking, self-sustaining individualists, and that government is a failed method of addressing the ills that occur in the state of nature. It’s a charming idea for some, but on a practical level it makes no sense.
So how do you respond to public choice cynicism? You start by removing the premise that man can exist outside or prior to society; that is, you politely point out that real libertarianism is practically impossible and philosophically incoherent. Then you embark upon the onerous but very necessary mission of organizing the state such that everyone can embrace its existence, even if they disagree over the particulars of how it functions and what it provides.
Mack Lannahan 