• home
• chapters
• bio
• contact

• bibliography

TOP NAV

Home

Chapters

Bio

Contact

BOOK

Books

CHAPPIES

All

Beck/Graves

Hayek

Mises

Northrop

Novak

Paglia

Stark

Turner

Voegelin

Wilber

JV CHAPPIES

Beito

Boyd

Green

print view

The Crisis of the Administrative State

It wasn't supposed to be like this. Huge government debt and financial instability were supposed to be problems confined to South American dictatorships. Idleness was a problem of unregulated capitalism, the bad old days when employers exploited the reserve army of the unemployed. Ineffective government belonged to the bad old days of patronage and royal sinecures. But now every developed country is bending under the weight of huge government debt. European levels of unemployment have come to America, and trend spotters warn that high unemployment will continue for years after the recession of 2008-2009. Governments at every level are failing to deliver social services competently and efficiently. Something has gone wrong with the modern state.

The core functions of government are rather simple. Norman Tebbit, minister in the United Kingdom in the 1980s, put it succinctly. A state must have territory and a people. It must defend its territory from aggressors foreign and domestic, a currency, and a legal system to foster agriculture, industry, and trade. Modern governments do all that rather well, because they are all tasks that can be done by bureaucratic routine. You can write a law to govern these areas and expect it to work for decades. But people do not go into politics to watch the grass grow. That is why governments have ventured into areas for which they are not suited, areas requiring adaptability, flexibility, and creativity. We are talking about retirement finance, health care, education, and the relief of the poor. Modern governments have failed miserably in all these areas and their failures have placed their core functions at risk.

But if the modern state is failing, what shall we do? Today the centralized administrative state has taken over much of our lives. We just expect the government to school our children, and we know that we could never afford to pay for private school on their own. We never knew a time when government didn’t run a universal pension scheme, and who would trust Wall Street for their retirement rather than government? We never knew a time when government didn’t run the health care system. We cannot imagine paying for health care without huge government subsidies. After all, a single expensive illness could wipe us out.

But the notion that government could, and indeed should direct the minute details of peoples’ education, health care, and pensions is relatively new. It all began in the second half of the 19th century when various movements of the newly active middle class wanted to put the wealth thrown up by the Industrial Revolution to good use.

Old reactionaries were glad to slip a curb into the mouths of the new textile magnates. Educated elites were anxious to form the minds of the illiterate masses with formal schooling. Middle-class thinkers were anxiously to smooth the edges of the new individualism with new forms of community. Workers wanted a share of the franchise and a seat at the table of power. Limited in imagination, these activists could not conjure up in their minds any method to advance these social goals except through government. They decided to solve their problems with political power.

In its pure form political power is the power of the war leader. He calls his nation to arms to repel the invaders. All resources in the nation are marshaled into the supply of the army. Credits are approved in the legislature; taxes are raised; money is printed, bonds are sold. Afterward, after the crisis and the glorious victory, it is time for retrenchment, for a resumption of payments, a funding of the debt, and a return to normal commercial relations. This was the policy of the British government after the supreme effort of the Napoleonic Wars when the National Debt reached 250 percent of Gross Domestic Product. This was the policy of the United States after its Revolutionary War and its Civil War.

This old policy no longer holds, and for a simple reason. In the old days governments only attempted to seize the commanding heights of the economy during war. Modern governments have commandeered the economy for political purposes during peacetime. Government is the chief guarantor of pensions for the aged. It is the principal in the organization of health care. It is the educator of children and the reliever of the poor. These great social responsibilities thus no longer engage the enterprise of the people but of the rulers. And the rulers do this work very badly.

The reactionary landowners have died off. The workers have risen into the middle class. But the educated elite of the 19th century is now the Ruling Class of the 21st century, and like ruling classes everywhere, it cannot see what everyone else can see. Its moral vision has become a corrupting orthodoxy, its evangelical faith established into a dull and plodding national secular church complete with all the vices of preferment, indulgences, simony, sinecure, and self-dealing that prevailed in the ancien regime. The time has come to return government to the tasks it does best: respond to national crisis and to operate the routine machinery of state: law, police, and currency. All work of a creative nature, that demands adaptability and flexibility, must be returned to the people where it belongs.

A new moral movement now hears the call to reform the corruption, the injustice, and the sheer incompetence of the modern administrative state. It begins with the simple words of British Prime Minister David Cameron. “There is such a thing as society. It’s just not the same thing as the state.” Humans are social animals, not cogs in a government machine.

Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.americanmanifesto.org.

print view

Beyond Mere Blame
What led our liberal friends into the blind alley of the administrative welfare state?

Government and the Technology of Power
If you scratch a social reformer, you will likely discover a plan for more government.

Business and the Web of Trust
Business is all about trust and relationship.

The Bonds of Faith
No society known to anthropology or history lacked religion.

All of the Above
Society is differentiated into three sectors.

Springtime for Freeloaders
The modern welfare state encourages freeloaders.

The Curse of Compulsion
The larger the government, the smaller the society.

The Real Meaning of Society
Broadening the horizon of cooperation in the “last best hope of man on earth.”

The Greater Separation of Powers
If you want to limit power then you must limit power.

To email the author, click here.

 TAGS

The incentive that impels a man to act is always some uneasiness... But to make a man act [he must have] the expectation that purposeful behavior has the power to remove or at least to alleviate the felt uneasiness.
Ludwig von Mises, Human Action

“But I saw a man yesterday who knows a fellow who had it from a chappie that said that Urquhart had been dipping himself a bit recklessly off the deep end.”  —Freddy Arbuthnot
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison

At first, we thought [the power of the West] was because you had more powerful guns than we had. Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. Next we focused on your economic system. But in the past twenty years, we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity.
David Aikman, Jesus in Beijing

[In the] higher Christian churches… they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks along a string of scaffolding who have long since forgotten their danger. If God were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it every minute.
Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm

“Civil Society”—a complex welter of intermediate institutions, including businesses, voluntary associations, educational institutions, clubs, unions, media, charities, and churches—builds, in turn, on the family, the primary instrument by which people are socialized into their culture and given the skills that allow them to live in broader society and through which the values and knowledge of that society are transmitted across the generations.
Francis Fukuyama, Trust

In England there were always two sharply opposed middle classes, the academic middle class and the commercial middle class. In the nineteenth century, the academic middle class won the battle for power and status... Then came the triumph of Margaret Thatcher... The academics lost their power and prestige and... have been gloomy ever since.
Freeman Dyson, “The Scientist as Rebel”

Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority — the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ‘we should...’.
Danny Kruger, On Fraternity

What distinguishes true Conservatism from the rest, and from the Blair project, is the belief in more personal freedom and more market freedom, along with less state intervention... The true Third Way is the Holy Grail of Tory politics today - compassion and community without compulsion.
Minette Marrin, The Daily Telegraph

“When we received Christ,” Phil added, “all of a sudden we now had a rule book to go by, and when we had problems the preacher was right there to give us the answers.”
James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh

I mean three systems in one: a predominantly market economy; a polity respectful of the rights of the individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; and a system of cultural institutions moved by ideals of liberty and justice for all. In short, three dynamic and converging systems functioning as one: a democratic polity, an economy based on markets and incentives, and a moral-cultural system which is plural and, in the largest sense, liberal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

There was nothing new about the Frankish drive to the east... [let] us recall that the continuance of their rule depended upon regular, successful, predatory warfare.
Richard Fletcher, The Barbarian Conversion

“We have met with families in which for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school.”
E. G. West, Education and the State

mysql close