The Gardens of Democracy: A New American Story of Citizenship, the Economy, and the Role of Government (12 page)

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Authors: Eric Liu,Nick Hanauer

Tags: #Political Science, #Political Ideologies, #Democracy, #History & Theory, #General

BOOK: The Gardens of Democracy: A New American Story of Citizenship, the Economy, and the Role of Government
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The moral is clear, and urgent for our times: When seed is spread unevenly, the garden yields less fruit. When it’s spread more evenly, it yields more fruit. And this in turn yields more seed for the next season, which enables the evenly spread plot to yield still more fruit. In societies that have true prosperity, the rich don’t get richer;
everyone gets richer.
America used to understand a simple, and very self-interested precept that benefited the entire country:
we are all better off when we are all better off.
Of course, in societies with true prosperity, the government tends the garden of economic life. It seeds, it feeds, it weeds. The reframing of what an economy is and how it works necessarily changes the story of what government is and how it must work. That is the focus of the next section of the book.
V. Self-Government
 
Big What, Small How
 
What is government for?—The failure of “limited-government” ideology and the hollowness of its libertarian core—The inability of traditional progressive approaches to meet current challenges—A new conception of government as gardener—A new approach to how government should work
 
 
WHAT IS GOVERNMENT FOR?
Over the last several years, this has been the dominant question of American politics. Yet so few leaders have offered coherent answers.
The Tea Party has energized the right in recent years but has offered little more than a reprise of unworkable ideas and worn rhetoric about “limited government.” The left, meanwhile, has been in a defensive crouch, reluctant either to embrace Great Society methods of governing or to acknowledge their shortcomings. President Obama has offered up defenses of government in speeches. But defending government is not enough. There is a higher threshold, for the President and all of us: to articulate, during this time of flux, an affirmative theory of government.
What should we expect government to do? How should government be doing it? And when we say “government,” just whom do we mean?
The current dissatisfaction with government is not a mere perception or marketing problem, as too many on the left still believe. It is a product problem. Government has for too many people become unresponsive, dehumanizing, and inefficient. And it has not successfully met the most serious challenges of our time. Only when we improve government itself will our satisfaction with it improve. Unfortunately, the American discourse on government has long been frozen in two dimensions: more vs. less government, big vs. small. We argue for an orthogonal approach: more government when it comes to setting great goals and investing to achieve them; less government when it comes to how we collectively meet those goals.
We call this theory of action “Big What, Small How.” Our view is that it strikes the right balance of both strategic purpose and adaptive, competitive implementation. Big What, Small How is rooted in Gardenbrain. In the following pages, we dissect the Machinebrain approaches that dominate our politics: conservative (Small What, Small How); libertarian (No What, No How); and liberal (Big What, Big How). We show why they are lacking and then outline our new approach.
The Limits of Limited Government: Small What, Small How
 
Let’s start by unpacking of the theory of “limited government,” propagated most often by the right but too often unchallenged by the left. It holds that:
–Democratic government derives legitimacy from the people (yes);
–It should be limited and as close to the people as possible (all right);
–Its charge is to safeguard individual rights and liberties (okay, though how best to do that is a matter of contention);
–In so doing the government’s scope of power is limited to a military to secure the territory, police to enforce laws, courts to adjudicate disputes, and some taxes to cover these costs (now comes trouble);
–Any other role for government is illegitimate, and any additional taxes constitute theft and push us toward communism (the nexus to reality loosens); and
–In any event, such redistributive policies are always inefficient compared to a free market (now that nexus is gone entirely).
This philosophy, if we can call it that, fails on three levels: theoretical, empirical, and political.
Theoretical emptiness.
The right idealizes “free enterprise.” But the way they invoke it presupposes a vacuum, the utter absence of context. It assumes that all people are equally free to learn or get capital or make beneficial connections and be “enterprising”—and that only evil government stands in the way of such freedom—when in fact, in the actual world, there is no such even spread of opportunity. “Free enterprise” assumes there is such a thing as an individual separate from the community, when in fact, an individual’s ability to pursue life, liberty, and property—to live up to his or her full potential—is realized
only
in community. Markets themselves exist only as social institutions, with rules made by people not by nature or deities. Personal responsibility is vital but grossly insufficient. The context of opportunity defines so much of our ability to act—our true freedom.
Conservatives believe the less government there is, the more freedom, wealth, and happiness, and they point to miserable, impoverished totalitarian states as reverse proof of their belief. This is a shockingly simpleminded understanding of how freedom works. The right thinks that if you have a freedom axis and a government axis, the relationship between the two variables is inverse and yields a straight-line graph. We believe, based simply on having opened our eyes, that the graph in fact yields a bell curve.
That is to say, there is a sweet spot where more government
enhances
freedom. Indeed, increasing freedom is the job of government. Sometimes that means letting people do what they want. Often it means getting them to do what they don’t want to, like paying taxes or not polluting, so that over the long term everyone can do more. The FAA prevents pilots from flying wherever they want but that increases our general freedom to fly. The SEC requires companies to truthfully state their results, which builds trust and enables us to buy stock as represented and without fear of fraud.
We agree that the sweet spot does devolve into a tail in which totalizing government stifles freedom, creativity, motivation, etc. But just because it’s possible to over-manage a company, over-coach a team, or over-tend a garden doesn’t mean that not managing, not coaching, and not tending makes sense.
Empirical failure.
One obvious reason for the right’s zero-sum, straight-line view of the relationship between government and freedom is the utter and unquestionable failure of communism as a method for organizing societies. But it doesn’t follow that every step government takes is a step towards communism or serfdom. In fact, there is not a stable, prosperous democratic society on earth without activist government, extensive regulation, and high, progressive taxation. The history and unrivalled success of Western capitalist democracies is the story of more activist government.
Market fundamentalists would have us believe that our success comes
in spite
of government. There is literally no evidence for this. Indeed, as Peter Lindert writes in his comprehensive international study
Growing Public
, increased public investments have always resulted in increased economic growth, and the net costs of social spending are essentially zero. Common sense suggests why. If less were always better, then the least regulated economies would be the most successful economies. The opposite holds. It is, in fact, the rules, regulations, standards, and accountability that government provides that fuel and lubricate markets. It is the investment in schooling, infrastructure, and health that maximizes the number and capacity of participants in the private sector. A robust state is not mutually exclusive with a free market; it is required for it. This is why there is no robust private sector on earth that isn’t accompanied by an equally robust public sector.
Consider that many of the 195 countries in the world have been running experiments in “limited government.” All are abject failures. If minimalist government worked, Somalia would be rich, stable, and secure and Canada would be a hellhole. Afghanistan would be a coveted destination and Denmark would be like a leper colony. In the comfort of a think tank in a country with air-conditioning and running water, to say nothing of the rule of law, it is very easy for American right-wing libertarians to pontificate about slashing government to the bone.
But ask any of them where they’d move their families if they had to leave the United States. Few would choose Afghanistan—a limited government state if there ever was one—over, say, Sweden or Japan.
Now, one might contend that setting up this slippery slope to Somalia is as much a debater’s cop-out as crying communism. Granted. But we state the case this way to highlight a simple truth: freedom isn’t free. This is true not only in the sense that it costs blood and treasure to defend freedom. It is true also in the sense that freedom, in anything other than an academic conception—that is, in the real world, with other people—means limiting one’s own sphere of action in the short term so that over the long term we can all do more.
Political failure.
Perhaps the most practical test of the limited-government idea is whether its adherents, when they are in power, can put the idea into practice. They cannot. They never have. Ronald Reagan, who told us government was the problem and not the solution, increased government spending 69 percent during his administration and removed the stigma from massive budget deficits. George W. Bush gave us Medicare Part D, the Department of Homeland Security, and two wars that have cost trillions. We grant that there are many libertarian conservatives who, because of this political fact, are as frustrated with establishment Republicans as with Democrats. But libertarian conservatives have always had the luxury of criticism from the sidelines. They have never had to govern—until, perhaps, now.
Libertarian Blindness: No What, No How
 
It’s worth pausing and addressing the heart of the limited-government view and its libertarian roots. Libertarianism is Machinebrain thinking at its worst. It rests on a linear understanding of social and economic systems and on the falsehood that humans are reliably and inherently rational, calculating, and selfish.
David Boaz, vice president of the libertarian Cato Institute, writes that “Libertarianism is the view that each person has the right to live his life in any way he chooses so long as he respects the equal rights of others.” And that “Libertarians defend each person’s right to life, liberty, and property—rights that people have naturally, before governments are created.”
Unobjectionable, this may seem. Until you think about it. For this worldview assumes that
all
humans can be counted on to be rational and to
actually and always
defend every other person’s rights. It also assumes that human societies are equilibrium systems, not prone to toppling over as a consequence of the actions of some of the participants. That is to say, it assumes that bad actors, those who do not respect other’s rights, can exist in isolation, and that their behavior will not affect the behavior of everyone else.

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