I’m having a little trouble finding something interesting to blog about, so I’m just going to throw down something that I’ve been thinking of doing for a while. For whatever it’s worth, it’s lightly inspired by one of Rachel’s latest articles.

Politically and philosophically, I’m a small-L libertarian - I think that a smaller, limited government is best, and that citizens should allow their government to tell other citizens what do do as little as possible. That said, as I’ve made abundantly clear in the past, I definitely prefer a muscular foreign policy. I’m also not into some of the stranger parts of Libertarian dogma, such as privatizing our road system and abolishing public property. There’s a question that begs itself in these stances, however - when should government intervene?

To understand why many conservatives and libertarians have problems with government, it’s best to understand how the oft-heralded alternative of free markets work. Think of a retail establishment for a second. In a retail establishment, you have two players - the operators of the retail establishment and the consumers. The consumers want to get as much as they can for as little time and money as possible. The operators want the consumer to maximize spending in their store. Equilibrium is achieved when the consumers and the operators get what they want enough where both are happy with the situation. This is the most efficient method of distributing goods we’ve been able to come up with - it keeps everything between the entity that needs the good and the entity that is either producing or delivering the good.

The problem with government is that, by its very nature, everyone is involved, or, at the very least, a group of people are involved that reflect neither the interests of the consumer or the producer. A decent example of where this could be a problem would be in contraband - the customer wishes to purchase a good, the producer wishes to sell the customer a good, but the government steps in (for whatever reason) and forbids the transaction. Alternatively, the government can raise taxes to a high enough level on that good where it’s impossible for the consumer and the producer to achieve satisfaction. The end result is the same - neither the consumer nor the producer can get what they want. In Libertarian and some conservative circles (depending on the context), this can be a big problem. After all, what right does anybody have to tell two consenting adults what they can do with their time and money? Consequently, government is seen as overbearing and inefficient - it restricts these transactions and its interference makes it less likely that the consumer and producer will find an arrangement that’s maximally mutually beneficial. The Big-L Libertarian answer is to simply come as close to abolish government as humanly possible.

There’s just one problem - government actually is good at certain things. Government excels at solving any problem that the entire public, by necessity, is interested in. Take law enforcement, for example. At one point, law enforcement was largely a privatized, for-profit endeavor, engaged in by the likes of the Pinkerton National Detective Agency. It was fairly effective, but there were two big problems with this approach:

1. Only the people that could afford the services could receive them.
2. The methods of the for-profit groups weren’t transparent to all parties involved - they only needed to be somewhat transparent between the entity purchasing the service and the entity providing the service.

The trouble with this arrangement is that law enforcement is something which all citizens have a vested interest in. In a just society, you want the law to apply equally to all people. If only the well-off are able to afford law enforcement, only the well-off will receive justice. That’s a problem, and is precisely the sort of role that government is great at stepping into. Equally importantly, government can also be a wonderful tool for ensuring that every possible party can have a say in the activities upon whatever government is tasked to do. In the example of the police, for example, government can circumscribe what limits the police in the process of solving or preventing a crime (How much force are they allowed to use? Do they have to read you your rights?).

As great as that sounds on paper, though, there are some very practical limits to the performance of a government. To start with, since our government, by its very nature, must be responsive to every single entity that addresses it (note that responsiveness does not correlate to satisfaction), it’s going to be extremely inefficient. To understand why, pretend you have a job where you’re assigned to do something but, whenever someone comes up to you and asks you a question, you have to respond with an answer. You don’t have to provide a detailed answer and you don’t necessarily have to provide the right answer on the first try, but you must come up with an answer of some sort. It doesn’t matter what your actual duty is going to be - if enough people are interested in what you’re doing, you’re going to be answering a lot of questions, and it’s going to take you a while to finish that task, whatever it might be. The second problem with government is that, by its very nature, it’s very difficult for it to do something that’s against the will of the majority at any point in time. Going back to our example, let’s pretend that not only can people ask you questions, they can also tell you what to do. If enough people tell you to do something else, you must do that instead. However, if enough people change their minds, or if enough people come in after the first group come in and tell you to do what you were originally doing, you have to go back to doing that.

Now, imagine that person being your doctor or a teacher. Sounds fun, doesn’t it?

Those are big weaknesses. Sometimes, things just need to get done - if too much time is spent talking about it, it may never get done, whatever it may be. Consequently, government action only makes sense in situations where either time is not a pressing issue or where a vast majority of the people involved simply don’t care about the particulars - they only care about the end goal. A great example of the former situation is the Interstate highway system; since it’s an organic system, it didn’t need to be finished quickly. Consequently, even though the Interstate Highway project began during the Eisenhower administration, it didn’t matter that it wasn’t finished until 1991, if you can ever considered it finished at all. A great example of the latter situation is the military; though people certainly care whether or not the military, say, abuses prisoners or shoots civilians, there’s not much desire by the public or the government (Harry Reid notwithstanding) to legislatively define strategy, troop movement, or logistics.

Note that, thus far, we haven’t even touched on morality. When should government intervene for the protection of its own citizens? What should government protect the citizens from, exactly? That, I’m afraid, will need to be a topic for another time.

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