It’s too often that we come across stories of Bureaucrats Gone Wild: Yet Another Children’s Lemonade Stand Shut Down. Except for the outrage stoked by conservative news sites, and rightly so, there isn’t much thought put into exactly why we just see the same scenario blindly repeating, like a skipped record, like a tragic farce in Greek theater.
There are all sorts of structural problems bandied about, but it seems to me that the best explanation for obnoxious bureaucratic overreach is because a certain type of person is drawn to the public regulatory field, and in a hypothetical lemonade example, the public health regulatory field in particular.
Now, it’s obvious that at least part of the motivation is that they’re concerned about the health and well-being of the population at large. That’s part of it. Part of it is genuine.
But we shouldn’t make the mistake that assuming motivations are singular, or that contradictory motivations can’t simultaneously exist.
Part of it, then, is also that Bureaucrats get a sense of fulfillment from making rules for people. Some people were born to make quixotic rules, and to feel good about enforcing them. Stimulus and stimulus response. Psychological payoff, for these types, is achieved by pressing the button of petty control. Even in a free market these sorts of folks would not evaporate. There is a glut, a glut of persons who receive stimulus through petty control and obstruction.
If we’ve exceeded the threshold of good rules to make, Bureaucrats will make bad rules. They get fulfillment from it, and so the field is largely self-selecting. Since they themselves wouldn’t dare risk sampling the lemonade from a child’s lemonade stand, they’re going to be good Bureaucrats and make sure their fellow citizens don’t, either.
The standard libertarian answer is that while those tradeoffs between risk and sweet lemonade made exist for the Bureaucrat, each individual has their own breaking points at which point they’d cease taking a risk and instead opt to play it safe. Some would jump at the chance for lemonade, while others would decline, saving sweet lemonade for another day and another place. The neoreactionary answer is a little more complicated: sure, each individual does have their own risk valuation systems, but the fact remains that actions don’t exist within a bubble.
And on the topic of risk valuation systems, it seems to me that libertarians are awfully naïve about markets in safety and information emerging for goods. Consumers necessarily differ in how they evaluate risk, and so since this information is dispersed, the ratio of risk relative to good x is unattainable, and so we can’t make ab initio claims of whether a market for safety would ever emerge. Everyone wants safety as a stipulated preference, but not at all as a revealed preference, judging by everyday behavior.
Take the example of e-cigarettes, for instance. Faithful claims of “the market will provide” to the contrary, there’s no telling in advance whether a market of safety will emerge, although you might be able to make decent guesses based on demographics and other indicators.
While virtually every action done affects someone else to some extent, risk valuation systems notwithstanding, it just doesn’t apply to the lemonade case. It just doesn’t.
And despite the fact that uncertainty over long-term performance of a good and uncertainty of the utility of that good over time makes ex ante and post facto valuations diverge, that still wouldn’t fucking apply to lemonade. It isn’t a large-scale item like a car. It’s a glass of lemonade. The gap between ex ante and post facto valuations doesn’t suffer from a large temporal distance in between. You experience the lemonade immediately, rather than having to wait to see over a five-year period whether the purchase of some asset really was worth it.
There’s still no justification for Bureaucrats frothing at the mouth and smashing pitchers of lemonade for fear of cyanide. There is no cyanide; there is no appreciable risk. There is no anthrax. There are no interesting or severe negative externalities worth even glancing at twice. Kids will be kids, and kids like to have lemonade stands. That’s it—that’s all.
But the difference is one on principle. Neoreactionaries agree with libertarians based on the empirical analysis, not the idea that individual voluntary actions are somehow sacrosanct and beyond the reach of the law. For the libertarians generally mystified by this approach, just think of it in terms of applying the concept of externalities broadly by looking at every voluntary “value adding” transaction and viewing it in terms of its externalities, its social goods, or social bads. It might disturb you how many are in trouble.
But when interference looks like it may be warranted, the answer has to be: it depends, it depends, it depends. You might say that that inevitably leads to overreaching governmental interference. That might be true. But you’d only want to oppose intervention on principled grounds if you could convincingly show that the population is virtuous enough not to speed us toward entropy. Government interference or system entropy? These are the tradeoffs. This is in part the task of government: system entropy management.
“But intervention creates a black market, intervention never works.” The greatest fallacy of the libertarian community is arguing that if prohibition results in a battle between state and individuals that the state ought to just unilaterally throw in the towel. Not all goods are fungible. Some are easier to prohibit than others, and some hills are worth fighting on and dying on, and some hills are not.
I hate Bureaucrats, but I recognize serious market failures. And I still hate Bureaucrats. And I still see the need for system entropy management. But I also read copious amounts of public choice theory. And the more I see the two divergent paths, the more I see that the legislature and its executive agencies, as children of the democratic apparatus, are essentially internally divided forces, powerless to prevent the slow descent into entropy encouraged and helped along by markets. Efficient destruction, aggressive mediocrity. Capitalism is useful, but ultimately not a friendly.
Agencies and legislatures are mired in their own internal quagmires and corruption. Structural problems on the governmental side place the state at a tremendous disadvantage in a strategic regulatory game on the battlefield against market forces. And this contributes to the eternal frustration of the east coast think tank apparatus. Brookings may be right about market underperformance and the need for targeted subsidies, but somehow, despite the fact that their economic analysis is often correct, they haven’t seriously considered institutional implementation. They may protest, but protest away. The problem is that they think in terms of economics, rather than political economy. Economics doesn’t occur within a vacuum, and placing economic recommendations through the institutional process and complaining when the wrong outcome is generated is asking for a beating. Begging, even.
Libertarians are often wrong on their economic analysis, and their saving grace is not even necessarily just public choice theory, but dysfunction and division in democratic systems on a more general level, ensuring poor performance, misfiring, or inability of agencies or legislatures to properly adjust in relation to the actors they are targeting or regulating on the market battlefield.
This presents yet another argument for the dismantling of democracy, and one which the left may readily pick up. For the left, Occupy Wall Street has expressed deep and lingering dissatisfaction with the way democracy has slid into what they term a loose form of plutocracy. But they’re not there yet, and that’s mostly because they believe democracy is still salvageable. Gosh darn it, all they need is Democracy Now And This Is What Democracy Looks Like. A few more rallies generously funded by Soros money, and we’ll expel the Optimates from unduly influencing the electoral process through campaign finance. This unfounded optimism eventually has to die hard. Standard Democratic theory, putting the bluster of academics aside, has nothing ill to say about the Koch brothers, who are completely legitimate parties forwarding their competitive interests in a peaceful and democratic manner.
“That’s not democracy!” Oh, but it is. To the progressives, hear me out. Assume for a moment that you capture the legislature and subjugate it to grassroots progressivist ideology. Could you outplay market actors using the cumbersome legislative apparatus? The legislative structure is of course optimized for inefficiency and the free operation of factions. Through the bureaucratic apparatus?
Think of it like it a strategic battlefield, a game of chess. Corporations, especially privately held ones, are effective at playing lightning fast responses to shifts in incentive/rule structures. As a piece on the board, legislatures cannot keep up. There is no singular will, there is divided will.
The legislature cannot manage market forces, a phenomenon that’s ramping up in speed at a head-spinning rate. Capital flows beyond the control of the state. Techno-commercialism is tearing states down. Libertarians wholeheartedly voice approval at this outcome, but they fail to understand that capitalism is ultimately not a friendly, and there comes a point in time which battle has to be done to maintain entropy levels—this is imperative for both the left and the right. Entropy is hard, gnon-ish feedback and is indiscriminate in who it hits across the political spectrum.
The only way to fight corporations on the battlefield is to fight fire with fire. Only a combination of state power and efficient organization is up for the task. A democracy is totally impotent unless it possesses ideal demographics and cultural pre-conditions, at which point corporations are largely self-regulating anyway, so a democracy just serves to get in the way.
Institutional reform is paramount. Patching up the hull of democracy leaves the force of entropy dangerously untouched. To hope that the market cooperates and plays cooperatively is fatal: the market isn’t tasked with polity-order and managing societal entropy levels, but rather with profit-maximization. Capitalism is not a friendly, and democracy takes a thousand moves to counter capitalism’s one.
Institutional reform on its own without a precipitating shift in material conditions is useless. Entropy will punish democracy. Capitalism will take advantage. Yet, entropy has to be dealt with at some point. Entropy doesn’t go away. This suggests that capitalism may, just may, be the driving force towards more autocratic forms of government to purge entropy conditions and forces in a spat of violence–before sinking beneath the surface for a hundred years until democracy reemerges and repeats the cycle. Entropy is accelerating, the free market nods its head, and democracy is intrinsically bound, gagged, divided, leaderless, impotent. Entropy is coming, and democracy weaponizes one thede against another for the purpose of electoral games. Entropy is coming, and corporations rent-seek: prostitutes for legislators in exchange for ignoring entropy.
What happens when the valve finally bursts?
