In Defense of the State

As the Presidential elections in the United States draw nearer, the tensions between the two major parties and their avid supporters increase. Yet to many observers less interested in the well-being of any particular party, it seems that regarding many issues the Republicans and the Democrats are interchangeable, and very much comparable in the rest. Since the days of Theodore Roosevelt however, the two parties have had at least one major perceived difference: whereas the Democrats are seen as supporting a large government, the Republicans have for decades pronounced a philosophy of small government and even less government influence on people's daily lives, something which has not unimportantly contributed to the electoral successes of the party, such as there were.

Why is this, that in the United States (and increasingly also in Europe, especially the United Kingdom where Prime Minister Thatcher revitalized the originally strong laissez-faire movement in the country) a large government is seen as the root of, if not all, then at least most evil? Where having a system of government-supported influential institutions is prima facie evidence of leftist corruption, and nothing is a better way to lose an election than proposing more regulation of an issue, any issue, there must be a strong aversion to social-democracy.

Yet that aversion is based on a complete and rather baffling misunderstanding of the fundaments of social-democracy. In order to set right this right, it is important to look at how in a democratic system (dispensing with the semantic issue of "democracy" versus "republic") a strong government can be beneficial to all without decaying into either an authoritarian nightmare or a boundless bureaucracy of surrogate activities.

One of the crucial functions of government in a democratic society, one that is really the core of the system, is the accountability of it by way of politics and its derivative processes, like elections and newspaper editorials, etc.
Now the market as a process is capable of distributing all goods and properties in a manner which is the most economically efficient. Ever since the collapse of the dictated economies of the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics, not even most communists would dispute this; social-democracy does not do so at all, and is not opposed to free market thought of necessity. But the important aspect is the accountability of the market to function as a means of achieving the public goals desired, and that is where the government comes in.
A market can arrange things according to the optimal economic efficiency, but it can do no more. The democratic government, however, can reflect all the goals that the public deem desirable, and can strive to achieve all of them by the means available. This means, in practical terms, that it can choose not only to support the goal of economic efficiency, but also for example pursue a goal of optimal benefit to the environment, or of making as many people as possible posess a certain good, or making as many people as possible not posess it, or any goal as limited by the human political imagination.

This is not to say that the government in a social-democrat system should supplant the free market. If the goal as declared by the public (by means of public discourse) is indeed economic efficiency, then the free market and a strong government can go hand in hand, and then no social-democrat ideal will restrain it. But leaving everything to just the market unnecessarily limits all the possible goals of a society to just that one goal, and that is where the first major problem lies with laissez-faire. Especially if one considers that in common behavior people's wishes almost always relate to their direct economic desires, but their own priorities for happiness often do not do so at all.

Now we come to the next stage. As such, modern society should (and will) reflect the great variety of goals and wishes of the general populace, and as we have seen, many of those wishes might not be suited for using the market as the process to achieve them, or to give them the necessary free space to pursue them, as a democratic society, tolerant of variety, should. Well if the free market is for some or most of those not suited, then how will this necessary free space come into being? The answer is that the public can facilitate this for themselves, by voting to draw the financial means to create that space from the free market process (which is in any capitalist state by far the largest social process). In other words, the public can vote to create a taxation of some kind to pay for the necessary free space. Repeat this for the great variety of wishes and interests of the public as explained before, and quite a large administration comes into being already.

Added to this come the various regulations and measures that the public can take besides taxation to facilitate this free space by nonfinancial means, such as quality standards, educational purposes, environmental regulation, etc. etc.
Now this large public administration of the public's pursuit of happiness will eventually grow so large, that it will become hard to directly oversee the various functions and systems of administrative law and administrative behavior that guide it. Yet to prevent a true Leviathan of bureaucracy to overwhelm and suffocate the democratic structures of the nation, oversight will be needed. In fact, what will be needed is regulating the regulators.

Now this is where social-democracy does not fail the society it claims to support, contrary to the feelings of the parties and movements as mentioned in this blogpiece. Because it is not only socialist, but also democratic.
The necessities to protect the individuals of the public from suffocation and abuses by the large government that facilitates their happiness, and to prevent the individuals that make up that government from exercising détournement de pouvoir, a strong Constitution will be needed, and one with the essential checks and balances to, finally, prevent the various administrative branches from attacking each other.
And here comes the catch: most, if not all, of the nations of the West already have such Constitutions. So the requirements for a succesful social-democracy are in no way inconsistent with the liberal and Enlightened traditions of Western thought, and can very well function within the frameworks of the various state systems of the Western nations, as all of those aspire to achieve or create exactly these protections and balances.

So why see social-democracy as an ideology hostile to individual freedoms, or inconsistent with market theory or Western tradition? Nothing is more suited for it.
Posted by Matthijs Krul @ 18:42