The State by Anthony de Jasay (34 page)

Table 2

Rich party offers Poor party offers

To the rich -9 -10 To the middle +9 +10 To the poor 0

0
0

(3)
Under (2) the rich party would win. It would get theacceptance of the rich who would prefer to be taxed 9 instead of 10, and of the middle who would prefer to get all the pay-off rather than having to share it with the poor. However, "going for the middle ground" is a game two can play; to stay in the race, both must. So the outcome is as in table 3.

Table 3

Rich party offers Poor party offers

To the rich -9 -10 To the middle +9 +9 To the poor 0 +1

0
0

1. Neither competitor can further improve its respective tender. Logically, both are equally apt to secure the consent of the majority. The rich party's tender is voted for by the rich, the poor party's by the poor. The middle is indifferent between the two offers. It is equally rational for it to join the top half or the bottom half of society or to toss a coin.*9
   
 

2. The astute reader will have divined that the simple mechanism laid bare above, through which democracy produces redistribution, would continue to operate, mutatis mutandis, in a setting where a constitution forbade redistribution. (The Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments of the American constitution were, for a time, held to do so.)*10 If there is no way round it, perhaps by taming the guardian of the constitution, it must be amended, brought up to date, adjusted to changing circumstances. Instead of 50 per cent, it is then the qualified majority which the constitution requires for its own amendment, that becomes the dividing line in society between top and bottom, rich and poor. The pay-off out of which to fashion a redistributive offer which will, at least under the assumption of consent being solely a function of alternative offers of public money, secure support for amending the constitution, is the money that can be taken from the blocking minority if it is amended.*11
   
 

3. The artificial mechanics of competitive political tendering, which produce the equally artificial result of finely balanced electoral indeterminacy, must of course be taken with a pinch of salt. Neither the state nor its opposition, no matter how coldly professional and competent at engineering electoral platforms,
   

could possibly formulate patterns of seduction with anything like the precision required for our result. Nor would all voters correctly understand and evaluate the prices that were being bid for their support, i.e. the incidence on their income of complex redistributive policies. Many of these might be presented to look more lucrative to the gainers or less costly to the losers than the probable reality. Ignorance, the unpredictability of true incidence and the opacity of social and economic matter, would handicap not only the electorate but also those seeking to gain its support. Even if both competitors used the same data, the same surveys sold by the same pollsters, they could not risk sailing this close to each other. In reality, the coveted middle ground, too, must be much broader than in our illustration, and its benefits from redistribution more diluted.

1. Nevertheless, for all their artificiality, observing the workings of our schema of electoral democracy is more useful than looking at the mere spinning of wheels. It confirms in the simplest possible manner an intuitively plausible presumption: that material interest alone is insufficient to determine the award of power to one contender rather than another, for the contenders, even if they carry different flags, end up by appealing to substantially the same interests, which they attract by holding out much the same payoff. The more familiar corollary of this is the "convergence of programmes," the tendency (which some consider a strength of democracy) to narrow down the range within which policies (as well as the images candidates for high office must project) remain electorally viable. The obverse of this coin, of course, is the complaint of the non-conformists that electoral democracy precludes genuine, distinctive alternatives; the very principle of popular choice leads to there being little to choose from.
   
 

Our account of the "pure," rich-to-middle tax-and-transfer kind of redistribution which the state, confronted by rivals in electoral democracy, would adopt under certain simplifying assumptions, is to a general theory of redistribution as, in economics, perfect competition is to a full theory of producers' behaviour. It is a stepping stone or heuristic device without whose help more general propositions might not emerge clearly enough. Though I neither claim, nor require for my arguments, to propose a general theory of redistribution, I do sketch some likely looking components of such a theory in the rest of this chapter. Their intent is to explain some of the dynamics of how civil society, once it grows addicted to redistribution, changes its character and comes to require the state to "feed its habit." From benefactor and seducer, the role of the state changes to that of drudge, clinging to an illusory power and only just able to cope with an inherently thankless task.

4.2.28 We have learnt that consent is, by and large, not bought with acts of once-for-all state help to the majority at the expense of the minority. Help and hindrance must be processes, to maintain a stipulated state of affairs which, without such maintenance, would revert to something rather (though never exactly) like what it was before. The beast must be fed continually. If this must be performed under conditions of open democratic competition, whatever of its subjects' liberty and property the state manages to appropriate, must be redistributed to others. If it does not do so, the redistributive offer of its competitor would beat its own and power would change hands. Tenure of power, then, is contingent upon its not being used at the state's discretion. The resources over which it gives command must be totally devoted to the purchase of power itself. Thus, receipts equal costs, output equals input. The analogy with the firm which, in equilibrium, can by
maximizing profit do no more than earn its factor costs (including the entrepreneur's wages), is compelling.

1. We are nearing the heart of the matter, bumping as we do at this juncture into the theory of the state. If the point in being the state were to have power (that is, if that were the state's maximand, its end), it would mean very little to say that the state has maximized it in the situation whose equilibrium conditions we have deduced above. Social power, as we know from Max Weber, is its holder's capacity to make, by recourse to combinations of physical force and legitimacy, another do what he would not have otherwise done. The quintessential democratic state has the capacity to make given subjects in civil society surrender to it given parts of their good. They would not have done it without its "power." But it has no capacity to make them surrender any more nor any less. It would lose "power" if it tried. It must tax the subset S of society an amount T, and it must distribute T' to another subset U. It cannot alter either S or U, it cannot vary T nor have T' fall short of it. It must not indulge its sympathies, follow its tastes, pursue its hobbies, "make policy" and generally promote the good as it conceives it, on pain of being booted out.*12 Though it can make another do something the latter would not have done, it cannot choose what it will make him do. It lacks the other essential attribute of power: discretion.
   
 

2. If power as an end in itself meant "being in power," it would not matter to the power-holder that he must use it in one unique way, only for this and not for that, as long as he held it. But it would make for shallow theory to put this in the role of maximand. By the same token, we would get only a theory of snobbery if we were to put holding a title of nobility as the purpose of the noble's existence, stripping out estates, privileges, ethos and social and
   

economic functions. The state could not use this residual sort of power, nor seek more of it. It could only have or not have it. If it were satisfied with it, pure electoral democracy would be a sort of terminal stage of political development, and our argument would be substantially at an end.

1. But while relief from further labours might be a pleasant by-product for the writer and his reader, allowing the state to be motivated by such a shallow, near-empty concept of power would grossly misrepresent historical experience. It would contradict, or at least leave unexplained, the state's evident striving over most of modern history for more autonomy, for discretion in deciding what it will make people do. Only the will to have power as a means can properly explain that. The logic of competition, however, is such that democratic power in the limit becomes the antithesis of power as a means to freely chosen ends.
   
 

2. That the wheel thus comes round full circle is yet another illustration of the distant consequences of actions in and upon society being mostly unintended, unforeseen or both. A state seeking to govern mainly by consent instead of by repression cum legitimacy, may have fallen victim to lack of foresight, weakness of will or inconsistency. But it might equally well have been rational, when seeking greater freedom of manoeuvre, readier obedience, lesser reliance on narrow class support-in short, when seeking more discretionary power-to look for it in democratic reforms, in increasing reliance on consent. At the outset, it positively provoked its subjects to make demands upon it, as a vendor might drum up custom for his wares by passing out samples and testimonials, in order to create a political market in which consent could be earned in exchange for state provision of utility and equality. At the end of the day (most such days lasting
   

about a century), such states found themselves, in a special but quite precise sense, virtually powerless, having their policies decided for them by the need of competitive electoral equilibrium and generally running hard to stay in the same place. It is academic to ask whether they could have foreseen this sort of result. Plainly, they have not. In exoneration, they had less warning than Adam before he ate from the tree of knowledge.

4.2.3
3

Author: Jasay, Anthony de Title: The State

Anthony de Jasay

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4.
RedistributionAddictive Redistribution

Help and need feed upon one another; their interaction can give rise to uncontrolled cumulative processes.

4.3.
0

By helping to create entitlements and to form interest groups, the state changes society in its image and at its peril.

1. Redistribution is potentially addictive in two distinct though related respects. One concerns the behaviour of persons and families-society's fine-grained basic stuff. The other acts upon groups, affecting in so doing the coarser, more visibly "structural" features of society. Fusing the two into a single group theory (since we could always say that families are small groups and isolated individuals are incomplete groups) might have had the elegance of greater generality, but the split treatment seems to me clearer.
   
 

2. The root ideas concerning the habit-forming effects of redistribution on persons and families are old and well worn. Their public acceptance reached its zenith with Cobden and Herbert Spencer (to whom one might add the peculiarly American phenomenon of W. G. Sumner). For no better reason than the boringness of virtue, they have since lost much of their currency.*13 Victorian homilies about self-reliance, about God helping those who help themselves and about the corrupting effect of charity, have practically disappeared from public discourse. On the other hand, the fully fledged welfare state has now been functioning long enough, and it has permeated the life of broad enough strata in society, to make it possible for theorizing to take the place of moralizing about these matters. A general sort of hypothesis would suppose that a person's behaviour over some period is affected, in a number of unspecified ways, by the receipt of unrequited help in the past or present period. Filling the empty box, it would be reasonable to assume, for instance, that receipt of help makes people consider future help more probable. Some of the self-reinforcing cumulative features of the provision of social
   

welfare would inspire the more specific hypothesis that the more a person is helped in his need, and the higher he rates the probability of the help forthcoming (until, in the limiting case of certainty, he ends up by having entitlements), the more his conduct will be reliant on it.

1. In line with the normal relation between practice and capacity, therefore, the more he is helped, the lesser will become his capacity to help himself. Help over time forms a habit of reliance on, and hence the likelihood of a need for, help. Habit, moreover, is not simply temporary adjustment to passing conditions. It implies more than changes in momentary, short-term behaviour. It involves a longer-term, quasi-permanent adaptation of the parameters of behaviour: it changes character. These changes may to some extent be irreversible. Withdrawal of the help in question becomes progressively harder to bear and adjust to; at some stage, it attains the proportions of personal catastrophe, social crisis and political impracticability. The noise and turmoil provoked by contemporary Dutch, British, German, Swedish and American attempts (I am listing them in what seems to me their order of seriousness) marginally to rein in welfare expenditures as a proportion of national product, lend themselves well to being interpreted as "withdrawal symptoms" in a condition where the addict requires a progressively larger dose of the addictive substance to "feed his habit."*14
   
 

2. There are straightforward ways in which the adaptation of behaviour and character to the public aids that are forthcoming, is capable of setting off the self-feeding processes which can be discerned in heavily redistributive societies. For instance, a degree of public care for the welfare of mothers and children relieves, if it does not remove altogether, the most pressing material need for