The Virtue of Inefficient Government
Thomas Jefferson said, "The
government which governs best, governs least." But Jefferson's wisdom needs
updating. The lesson of the 20 th century is clear: The government
which governs best, governs least efficiently.
Efficiency in government is a more elusive concept than efficiency in the
private economy, which may be measured relatively easily as output per units of
input. What is the government's "output"? But let us measure the efficiency of
a government by how well it is able to implement its own goals, whatever they
may be. This could be quantified in terms of money, people, or the total
elapsed time between the adoption of a policy and its complete implementation.
A perfectly efficient government would find its platforms instantly
implemented; a completely inefficient one would expend all its resources
without accomplishing any of its goals.
By this reasonable standard, the first place in efficiency
must go to dictatorships--the more vile, the more efficient. The more absolute
the power of the local tyrant, the more rapidly and completely his policy
desires are implemented. Cruelty and unpredictability are the techniques of the
real efficiency experts. Dissidents complaining? Just shoot them. Minor minions
acting up? Torture them--making sure to include some of your previous
favorites--and the rest will snap into line. It does cost a few bullets, but
bullets are cheap. And there is always a friendly arms merchant (usually from a
country with an inefficient government) ready to sell you some, even to arrange
foreign aid to help with the financing.
Despotic governments are so
efficient that they are easy to administer. Even the least capable or sane
humans can run them. Look at Caligula, Idi Amin, and the current bête
noire of the tin-hat set, Saddam Hussein. Once the opposition is dead, and
all but the most compliant are purged from the dictator's forces, what's there
to worry about? Foreign invaders or liberators? They usually serve to merely
entrench a tyrant.
That these leaders pillage
their people, destroy their economies, and leave no legacy apart from large
Swiss bank accounts tends to obscure their achievements as models of
efficiency. This efficiency hurts the citizenry because, by and large, the sort
of person who wants to be a dictator is rather nasty and self-serving. An
efficient government is dangerous in the hands of the wrong man. Sadly, the
right sort of man never seems interested in the job.
Hereditary
monarchies once provided a few well-meaning rulers. A despotic king might pass
power on to more enlightened progeny. The first Medici wasn't all that nice a
guy, but by Lorenzo's time, the Medici stock had mellowed a bit. Such brief
windows of rationality did not last long, but they gave mankind a much-needed
break. The Italian Renaissance flourished in small islands of such tolerance
amid a patchwork quilt of fiefdoms run by local strongmen.
There are no examples in the modern world of
absolute power being wielded for anything like the greater good--and it is hard
to imagine the situation arising. How would Mother Teresa ever come to
power? Absolute power may corrupt absolutely, but the applicant pool for this
sort of job isn't pristine to begin with.
The record of holy rulers is
none too good anyway--religious regimes tend to rank right after outright thugs
when it comes to efficiency. The mandate of God might seem like the ultimate
tool of power, but in practice, a theocracy is less efficient than the
whimsical brutality of a lone, unfettered ruler. This is not to say that
religious governments can't be brutal--they are, as a rule--but rather, that
they are bound by more constraints. The word of God generally is written in
some ambiguous form that is open to interpretation, and there is never a
shortage of interpreters. The leaders of a religious dictatorship must always
be on guard against some holier-than-thou revisionist bearing a new and
improved "Truth." In addition, the deity has a funny habit of prescribing more
rules and regulations than even liberal Democrats do, thus distracting
religious regimes with random rituals and requirements. Religious movements are
at their most efficient when they seek very basic goals--like subjugating women
or stifling free thought. Complex agendas are much more difficult for them to
accomplish.
Military dictatorships
generally are less efficient than those run by lone despots or the clergy.
Every self-respecting dictator will decorate himself with grand military
titles--but let us set these baubles aside and concentrate on dictatorships run
by genuine career military officers. Perhaps it is the military respect for
rank, discipline, and the maintenance of a chain of command, or--more
likely--the military love of acronyms and paperwork in triplicate. For whatever
reason, true military leaders are generally less effectual than plain old thugs
and zealots (although their political opponents get just as dead). As further
proof of my thesis, rank seems to correlate well with inefficiency: Few of the
generals who have served their country as despots can hold a candle,
efficiency-wise, to Col. Qaddafi. And it was a sad day indeed for hapless
Liberia when it suffered the ignominy of a coup led by a master sergeant.
The
Communists briefly occupied an intermediate stage in the hierarchy of
inefficiency. Condemned in their heyday as having total or "totalitarian"
power, their regimes were later revealed as corrupt bureaucracies, more
inefficient (and thus better) than we believed. Dismal images of Russia
unraveling after communism collapsed make an unintended point: At least there
was something to unravel, unlike in so much of the rest of the world. Poor
communism was inefficient enough that its people were able to accomplish some
things despite it, but efficient enough that they couldn't have cable TV. It
sat like a ball on a hill: Ultimately, it had to roll down one side of the hill
and collapse into democracy, or roll the other way and devolve into the
personality-cult despotism of a local tyrant. Tito and Castro are examples of
the latter, and they may soon have imitators, for it remains to be seen how
many post-Soviet democracies will last.
It is popularly supposed (particularly by people who live
in them) that democracies are "good," while various forms of despotism are
"bad." The evidence favors a far simpler proposition. Simply put, governments
are bad. The fundamental prerogative of governing is to control the actions of
individuals, and this power is remarkably prone to misuse. Quibbling that evil
leaders are to blame, not the institution of government itself, is a pathetic
evasion, reminiscent of an NRA bumper sticker that reads, "Governments don't
kill people, only criminal leaders kill people." Sorry, but with a 1-1
correspondence, why exempt the mechanism? Without the force of government
behind them, Pol Pot would have been fairly harmless and Hitler, a third-rate
artist. With it, each killed millions. Ted Bundy with the government behind him
would have been a lot worse than Ted Bundy operating solo.
The examples of great evil
done by governments are easy enough to rattle off. But what about the examples
of great good to balance them? There aren't any. Politicians and other
apologists for the institution gamely assert the supposed benefits of
government, but it is a short and shallow list. Good is done, to be sure, but
in little dribs and drabs that aren't enough to cover the cost. How many
centuries of good government would it take to balance the score for the
Cambodians?
The reason
societies with democratic governments are better places to live in than their
alternatives isn't because of some goodness intrinsic to democracy, but because
its hopeless inefficiency helps blunt the basic potential for evil. The
constraint of maintaining constant popularity is simply too large a burden to
bear. So, happily, very little gets done that is extremely bad--or extremely
good.
Democracy could always make itself efficient by
voting to anoint an absolute ruler. Democratic procedures brought Adolf Hitler
to power, for example. But this rarely happens. Instead, democracies evolved
ever more elaborate ways of tying the hands of their chosen leaders.
The prize for ultimate
inefficiency goes to America. We have built in so many checks and balances that
our "leaders" are the most thoroughly hogtied of any on earth. In a few weeks
those of us who overcome inertia and apathy will enter polling places to choose
our president, with less real choice than ever. Each candidate has tried to
outdo the other in adopting popular centrist stances and avoiding anything
difficult. We can rest assured that neither man will challenge the fundamental
structure that will render winner and loser ineffectual, come Inauguration Day.
Perhaps it would be better to have a restrained and less intrusive government,
as Jefferson envisioned. A pleasant thought, but one that relies on politicians
to restrain themselves. Better to let them restrain each other through
inefficiency, caught in a morass of checks and balances, our freedom guarded
not by fierce virtue but, rather, by simple unfeasibility. Not an elegant
result, but a practical one. I think, in this sense, Jefferson would be
pleased.
