[Although these remarks were delivered before the 22nd Annual Student Recognition Luncheon of Michigan Technological University’s School of Business and Engineering Administration on May 9, 1989, when I was dean of the School, my experience of two years as a state representative and contemplation of more recent developments in Washington (NAFTA, the crime bill, national health insurance, ...) have provided graphic reinforcement for the jaundiced conception of government presented here. Especially at the start of the biennial political season, readers may find these remarks to be of timely interest. SPD, June 16, 1996]
Semiconductor, steel, auto, ... manufacturers plead for continuing protection from maurauding foreign competition and “dumping,” a “crisis” in financial sectors requires immediate resolution, industry and its academic-cum-scientific handmaidens decry the loss of national “competitiveness” and call for a national “technology policy” and implementing institutions (a national technology foundation, technology centers, ...), universities and their highly-remunerated pork-barrel advisors (former Congressional aides and politically-retired bureaucrats) roam Capitol Hill peddling extravagent promises of cures for dread disease, high-temperature superconductors, low-temperature fusion reactors, synthetic metals, ..., all in exchange for trifling line-items in the federal budget, ... Ad infinitum (or, more accurately, mathematically and physiologically, ad nauseum). The ellipsis (“...”) becomes the only efficient device by which to give a sense of the burdens placed upon the shoulders of our leaders, giving a certain fevered intensity to the appeal, in orders of worship (of various protestant denominations at least), for divine guidance of monarches, presidents, legislators and our many other leaders, great and small. This is a supplication which even the areligious among us might hope will be granted.
The plight of our overtaxed leaders was well summarized by Auberon Herbert, a turn-of-the-century English libertarian, in an essay entitled “A Plea for Voluntaryism”1:
They are only men like you — men, in many ways disadvantaged, overweighted by the excessive burdens they have taken upon themselves, seldom able to give concentrated attention to any one subject, however important; necessarily much under the influence of subordinates, from whom they must gather the information on which they have to act; often turned from their own course by the dissentions and differences of their followers; always obliged to plan and maneuver in order to keep their party together, and then losing their own guiding purpose, and tempted into misleading and unworthy courses; often deciding the weightiest matters in a hurry, as in the case of the famous Ten Minutes Reform Bill; and physically leading a life which overtaxes health and endurance with the call made upon it, by the care of their own office, their attendance far into the night at the House, their social occupations, the necessity to follow carefully all that is passing in the great theater of European politics, and of studying the questions which each week brings with it. [p. 338]
Before we join in a loud and tearful chorus of lamentation, however, Herbert continues:
Think carefully, and you will feel that all these rash attempts of the handful of men, that we call a government, are a mere delusion... A handful of men can’t either think or act for you. Their task is impossible. If they try to do so, they can only be as blind guides who lead blind followers into the ditch. It all ends in scramble and confusion, in something being done in order to have something to show, in great expectations and woeful disappointments, in rash action and grievous mistakes, resulting from hurry and overpressure and insufficient knowledge, which lead the nation in wrong directions, and bring their long train of evil consequences. [pp. 338-9]
Unfortunately, while my friends in the [now-former] Soviet Union comprehend Herbert’s argument all too well, it does not appear to be intuitively obvious to contemporary American audiences. This is nowhere more evident than with regard to the U.S. international trade policy, as reflected in support for the plethora of protectionist measures incorporated in the 1988 trade “reform” act and in the ever more encompassing “competitiveness” bandwagon, onto which it would appear virtually all may clamber. Chauvinism and xenophobia writ large have replaced narrower national-security claims as an effective basis for asserting a right of entré into the public treasury. And, in contrast to Dwight D. Eisenhower’s military-industrial complex, members of which had to demonstrate at least some tangential military role, this is an open-membership organization, although the more slothful receive preferred status.
Perhaps the most depressing consequence of this successful exploitation of and by the state, this protectionism and politicization of all facets of our lives, is that the worst features of Herbert’s intrusive government invasively and malignantly proliferate, via artificial insemination or genetic engineering, into sectors which one might expect to be immune. The exploiation of resources for political purposes becomes more significant for a corporation or a bank than the conduct of its useful business. The scientific establishment’s extraction of resources from government becomes more significant than the trivialized science which is, almost as an afterthought, pursued.
Herbert eloquently characterizes the end result of this process:
If you wish to understand the deadly influences of protection, if you wish for a practical example, look carefully at all the distorted and perverted growths of trade enterprise that exist in some protected countries, the unwholesome combinations, the universal selfish scramble, the poisonous mixture of politics and trade influences, the use of the state power to watch over and favor the great monied monopolies, the long endurance of the public that tolerates the vilest things at the hands of its politicians, and you will realize how deadly is every form of protection, ... [pp. 362-3]
The recent and continuing spectacle of a falling Japanese government (Recruit, son of Recruit, son of son of Recruit, ...; again the ellipsis) provides only one further observation confirming Herbert’s thesis. The Japanese, not we, are the victims of Japanese protectionism, as a comparison of U.S. and Japanese wages and prices will clearly reveal. Aspects of Japanese culture may well be worthy of admiration and emulation, but certainly not Japanese politico-economic management.
My seminar students studied Adam Smith’s An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations,2 and as with reference to so many issues, Smith captured the essence of the problem vastly better that contemporary textbook authors, better than Herbert, certainly better than I:
The statesman, who should attempt to direct private people in what manner they ought to employ their capitals, would not only load himself with a most unnecessary attention, but assume an authority which could safely be trusted, not only to no single person, but to no council or senate whatever, and which would nowhere be so dangerous as in the hands of a man who had folly and presumption enough to fancy himself fit to exercise it. [p. 456]
Rather than lamentation and prayers for wisdom, might it not be better if we were to grant our leaders surcease?
Why, you may be asking, is this issue the focus of comments at a recognition luncheon? In answer, I give you a final quotation from Auberon Herbert:
[The politicization of life] tends to turn us all, whether members of legislatures, journalists, or electors, into persons who think superficially and act in a hurry on very imperfect knowledge. The enormous number of undertakings which pass under the hands of legislative bodies, and the enormous number of questions which are submitted to their decision, oblige all those who are concerned with political life to possess innumerable smatterings of piecemeal knowledge of various sorts, to form their judgements in the imperfect light of such smatterings, and to make the best show that is possible with such hastily gathered knowledge. Every member of a legislature ought to be a trained scientist in all branches of human knowledge, in order to perform the duties that everyday are thrown upon him. It has been said by some defenders of competitive examinations that their merit consists in developing the faculties that are specially required for the rapidly changing struggles of afterlife. As regards political life the plea is perfectly just; and the brilliant use of limited intellectual furniture, joined to an intrepid judgement on all subjects on the spur of the moment, is likely to be equally useful to the politician and the successful prize student. But neither the politician nor the prize student represent the best elements in the nation. [pp. 404-5]
We recognize here your accomplishments as “prize students,” but the world requires, and you should expect, more of yourselves than that. More is required than “brilliant use of limited intellectual furniture” and “intrepid judgement on all subjects on the spur of the moment.”