The death of big government was greatly exaggerated
www.globeandmail.com By DOUG SAUNDERS
Saturday, February 8, 2003 – Page F3
CAPE CANAVERAL, FLA. -- Most of the bulbs have long since burned out in the field of electric stars that covers the smoke-stained ceiling of the bar at Bernard's Surf. It has been about 40 years since Buzz Aldrin and company got tight in these red-vinyl banquettes, but it remains a popular, if seedy, hangout for the space cadets of NASA.
A week ago, this was a gloomy place, laid barren by the twin spectres of flaming wrecks and crashed economies in this company town. By Tuesday, though, moods were up and the Captain Morgan was pouring freely: George W. Bush had promised to spend $500-million more on the space agency each year, and there were signs that the local pipe dream, a nuclear-powered rocket to Jupiter costing $3-billion, would soon be approved.
The Space Coast is not the only place raising toasts to the miracle of government largesse. While Mr. Bush may speak loudly of his tax cuts, he has proved a very adept spender, emptying the public purse on all sorts of favourite friends and social crises.
This putatively free-market chief executive plans to boost government handouts to business at rates far exceeding the growth of the economy -- raising grants to farmers by 6.6 per cent annually, scientific research grants by 7.3 per cent, plus of course hundreds of billions extra to shipbuilders and other military contractors.
Government regulation, too, is back in fashion, in the post-Enron economy. Tariffs, on steel and softwood lumber, are happily defended on conservative grounds. Even the tax cuts are defended on the basis of recessionary "stimulus," a concept that sounds a lot like the interventionist ideas of John Maynard Keynes.
And this is only the United States. The hand of the state, heavy or light, has a prominent presence in the economy of every nation north of the equator. While politicians to the left and the right may argue about greater or lesser degrees of public involvement, there is no longer any talk of governments getting out of business.
This marks a dramatic change from the recent past. Mr. Bush may be on the distinct right, but his relationship to the economy is dramatically different from Ronald Reagan's or Newt Gingrich's, both of whom sought to get government utterly out of business. My initial response is to hope that Robert Nozick, who was buried almost exactly a year ago, was given a grave with plenty of rolling space.
It is almost 30 years since Mr. Nozick, a soft-spoken intellectual from Harvard, penned the words that made him the favourite philosopher of the world's most powerful governments. His life is a rare and surprising instance of an abstract academic argument bursting out of the campus to transform the world.
Mr. Nozick had been caught up in a dispute with political philosopher John Rawls, who in 1971 had transformed the world of ideas by arguing with deft and solid logic that it is possible to have a society based on radical individualism that also offers state-supported equality for everyone. This, and the school of thought it spurred, made liberalism a workable and humane alternative to socialism.
Mr. Nozick, a former leftist, applied considerable guile to the counterargument offered in his 1974 book Anarchy, State and Utopia.Only individuals, he began, can be sovereign. Governments cannot act on behalf of "society," since this does not exist except as an aggregate of individual purchasing decisions. "There is no social entity with a good that undergoes sacrifice for its own good," he wrote. "There are only individual people with their own individual lives. Using one of these for the benefit of others uses him and benefits the others."
As such, he concluded, the only morally allowable government is what he called the "night-watchman state," which provides rudimentary military protection and contract-settlement mechanisms but otherwise stays out of the way of economies and human behaviours.
It was only a few years until Mr. Nozick's reasoning exploded into the public sphere, becoming the guiding ideology of Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and a host of lesser imitators. Mrs. Thatcher, in one of her most famous interviews, managed to paraphrase Mr. Nozick quite precisely: "And you know, there's no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look after themselves first."
At first, you might be inclined to think that Mr. Bush is a proponent of the night-watchman state. The government, he said on Monday, "must restrain the growth in any spending not directly associated with the physical security of the nation." But while his words may sound consistent with Mr. Nozick's ideals, his actions do not.
Among his most sizable spending boosts were in funding for education and wealth-redistributing welfare services. Vast sums are to be spent on highways, drug benefits, schools for the poor, and of course $15-billion toward AIDS in Africa.
What has happened to the night-watchman state? To find it these days, you have to look south of the equator. For true-blue libertarians, Ethiopia has to be just about a textbook case. Colombia and Venezuela are coming close, by murdering their people and their economies, respectively. It is no wonder that Mr. Nozick eventually refuted his own views, writing in support of aggressive inheritance taxes, for instance, and modest wealth-redistribution programs.
Still, he knew that his moment had passed. When Mr. Rawls died late last year, he was celebrated prominently in the media as a pioneer; his sparring partner's death, a few months earlier, was treated as the tragic passing of a brilliant but obsolete curiosity. dsaunders@globeandmail.ca