Dear Friends,
It seems to me, any power given to government will eventually be abused. This is because of the incentive structure of government. You could replace the people in power with anyone else and the same outcome would happen… power would be abused. The more power in the hands of government, the more abuse of power there will be. This paradigm exists because the reward is immediate, while punishment is rare and distant. This short circuits the feedback mechanism. Hierarchies are all subject to this asymmetric incentive. Abuse of power is inherent in hierarchies, and government is the apex of hierarchies. History is filled with examples of this. The Sedition Act of 1798 was the Founding Fathers undermining their own philosophy of limited government.
All governments abuse power, even the most righteous ones… especially the most righteous ones. By righteous I don’t necessarily mean religious. I mean ideologues. People who have a righteous mindset define themselves by who they exclude more than by whom they include. The righteous are a small pure minority while the infidels are legion. Moreover, that small minority becomes ever more exclusive. This is because purity feeds on itself. Purity in ideology becomes more important the more power that righteous faction has. So, regardless of the ideology or religion, the righteous in government will exploit the law to punish infidels and reward the pure. They will feel not simply justified, but obligated. This is why zealots can be counted on to abuse power.
Madison’s pitting faction against faction has failed miserably. He thought that the small factions would vie among themselves and like a barrel of monkeys if one rose the rest would coalesce and pull it back down. That was his solution to keeping government from abusing power. The trouble is, a faction doesn’t have to be ascendant to be corrupting. All it need do is get away with a lack of ethics and it leads by example. A bad apple spoils the barrel, according to Ben Franklin. Each example of getting away with a lack of ethics is an abuse of power. Madison and indeed the Founding Fathers as a whole believed that government could be limited. They presumed that people each vying for their own self-interest would inherently limit government, although Tocqueville warned that was not the case.
Factions can buy power using tax money. Indeed, that’s the whole NGO business model. Those in power need not be corrupt at all for government to abuse power. True enough, there are the utterly corrupt, but Arendt exposed the worst outcome… rule by nobody. There is no one to go to when government abuses you. The person who is crushed by bureaucracy is abused by power just as if that abuse was from a greedy baron. This happens even when the laws that crush are written with the purest of intent. No law can take all contingencies into account. Moreover, the more they account for contingency, the more interpretive they become. An explicit law makes no room for contingency, so it crushes. An interpretive law makes room, and that room opens it to abuse. It’s a lose-lose scenario.
So it’s irrelevant who is in government. Government will abuse any power it’s given. The obvious answer is to limit the power of government. That’s easier said than done. Incentives stand in the way of meaningful reform to limit government. The Founders’ idea of faction against faction and jealousy of power failed. The only thing that did work, somewhat, was the Bill of Rights. It took two hundred years of judicial chipping away, and a bureaucracy was created to subvert it. If not for the negative liberties of the Bill of Rights we would live in a despotic system like the EU. Therefore, limits must be written into any constitution, the more the better. That’s the only thing that has shown some efficacy in limiting government’s abuse of power.
Sincerely,
John Pepin
