More than quietism, less than activism
Roger,
You remark that, as we confront—inter alia–the economic mess before us, one measure we should be mindful of “… might be to cast a beady eye on the passion for over-regulation, “paperwork” and “bureaucratic fuss” that seem to be a déformation professionelle of homo politicus, at least in his contemporary incarnation.”
Having worked in government paper mills for some 40 years, I could not agree more. To reference one of your favorite authors, Foucault, one can aver that the infinitely expanding micropractices of controlling bureaucratic paperwork become the Iron Cages of our brutish existence. For where there is federal largess there is always the distress of ever more control. It’s built into the bureaucratic mind usually disguised as the democratic logic of accountability–a veritable Death of Common Sense swamped by ever growing pyroclastic flows of a regulatory esprit de geometrie.
Yet, there are a number of vexations that weigh against my libertarian instincts. First, much of the modern regulatory malaise is rooted in the moral turpitude of the market place. We would not need an FDA if food and drug manufacturers would do their civic duties; we would not need an SEC and other financial overseers were financial institutions to act like responsible grown-ups; we would not need a consumer regulatory agency were producers to halt infusing all products great and small with lead and other toxic delights; we would not need onerous zoning laws if developers would not seek to located their latest abattoir or waste disposal facility in residential neighborhoods. If greed, as Gordon Gekko told us (not to mention the other six deadly sins), was not the operant virtue of many of our institutions, then the political class would have less cause to regulate.
This is not to argue that all regulatory problems can be laid at the door of the private sector. For second, there are the megalomaniacs, er…Command and Control politicians qua ideologues who want to impose their will on the world who also cause more than their fair share of our unfreedoms.
Third, social or individual dysfunctions like addictive behaviors or waiting for the Nanny (State) to save me do not help either.
Fourth, there are businesses who live for if not by the dole like agribusiness who gets billions a year so that they can prop up food prices, to name but one type of welfare for business.
A fifth vexation concerns market failure. Not all markets function well Thus we have antitrust legislation, pollution control (can the upstream paper mill contaminate downstream municipal water systems?), and government interventions in the health care markets (are you 55 and do you have a pre-existing condition?; if so, good luck getting health insurance). Our choice is to do something about market failures or just sit back and enjoy it while we howl at the moon and bray about our rugged individualism.
And last there is Hayek’s question of what to do with the wisdom of self-regulating markets versus the inherent limits of information and the therefore failure of any overly planned economy. Markets are instances of what Hayek called catallaxy, or self-regulating social systems—a kind of autopoesis of the market place. I am not questioning the apparent self-organization of markets or social systems—provided that we do not hypostatize them into an independent metaphysical realm by ascribing free will to these systems. Rather, I am concerned with the outcomes of markets and other social instrumentalities that produce havoc as they let slip their dogs of war on the innocent. Does Wilmington OH deserve its fate? Should GM employees suffer the slings and arrows of management’s incompetence? Surely they will, but me thinks that as a civilized society we should devise systems, as we have, to help families cope and change. Hayek himself believed this was an appropriate role for government.
We can just learn to live with the ravages of catallaxic systems–we can let farmers flail in the wind when crop prices crash, we can let hurricane survivors fend for themselves, we can tell vets that there maladies are all in their heads and that they should just shape up or ship out, we could, in short, just let Being be as in some sort of nightmarish Heideggerian Quietism. Or we can compensate for these ill winds that carry the spawns of their hell to all corners of the earth.
In short, these vexations are such as that we need to confront these dysfunctions but we should do so with the least amount of heavy handedness possible. For it is like unto the master/slave dialectic, a paradox of freedom to let social instrumentalities and the physical world around us work their “will” on us when we can have them do otherwise. It is equally a paradox of freedom to regulate our worlds such that the space of action becomes a space of mindless and endless rule following. By acting to balance the vicissitudes of autopoetic systems and our will to control all in the name of an enslaving freedom, we do not decrease our liberty but—if done well—we enhance our ability to choose and follow a life we want to lead, for it would seem that we are more than mere rudderless ships driven by winds and waves to a farthest coast of darkness, and we are less than the captains and commanders of all we survey.
