The State by Anthony de Jasay (51 page)

I cannot find the reason why this should be the case. An identical pay-off is potentially available to either the top or the bottom coalition. It is what the bottom coalition gets, or the top coalition keeps, if it succeeds in forming. (In my example, the pay-off is 10). Rather than become the minority, both the top 49 per cent and the bottom 49 per cent would gain by offering some of the pay-off to the middle 2 per cent to make it join a coalition. The middle
group would agree to the higher offer. The potential maximum offer is, of course, the entire pay-off (10 for both parties). But if either half did offer to give the whole pay-off to the middle for the sake of becoming part of the majority coalition, it would end up no better off than by resigning to become the minority. The game would not be worth the candle. The highest offer to the middle which it would be rational for either the top or the bottom half to make, therefore, would be the whole pay-off less the sum needed to make it just worth either half's while to coalesce with the middle rather than passively accept defeat.

This sum may be, for all we know, large or small (in my example, I used 1). Whatever it is, if it is the same for both halves of society, the top and the bottom coalitions are equiprobable and the result is indeterminate. For the contrary conclusion to hold, the poor must require a greater inducement to coalesce with the middle than do the rich. There seems to be no particular reason for supposing that this is more likely to be the case than not-at least, I cannot see one.

Let us note, before passing on, that in Nozick's scheme the top group and the bottom group would have to take the trouble of negotiating a coalition with the middle. In our scheme, the state and its opposition relieve them of this trouble by each presenting a ready-made deal, an electoral platform which they can simply vote for or against.

1. Cf. F. A. Hayek on the "Curious Story of Due Process," in TheConstitution of Liberty, 1960, pp. 188-90.
   
 

2. If 25 per cent can block the amendment, the pay-off iswhatever 24.9 per cent can be made to hand over to 75.1 per cent.
   
3. Cf. the essay of J. G. March, "The Power of Power," in D.Easton, Varieties of Political Theory, 1966.
   
 

4. Herbert Marcuse may be credited with reviving a somewhatelliptical version of the old-time belief in redistribution degrading the beneficiary's character. He saw the individual injuring himself in acquiescing in his own dependence on the welfare state. (An Essay on Liberation, 1969, p. 4.)
   
 

5. The OECD reported in 1983 that over the period 1960-81,public expenditure on health, education, old-age pensions and unemployment benefits rose from an average of 14 per cent to 24 per cent of GNP in its seven largest member countries. This rise was not primarily due to greater unemployment, nor to demographic bad luck (the effect of the latter is still mostly in the future). The OECD states that "populations which have become increasingly dependent on the welfare state will continue to expect support" and in order for continuing support to absorb no more than the actual proportion of GNP, i.e. for its relative weight to be stabilized, some quite ambitious assumptions about the future growth of the cost of existing entitlements and of the economy would have to hold true. The OECD refrains from pronouncing on the likelihood of actual performance measuring up to these assumptions.
   
 

6. There is, in all circumstances, a general reason for regardingsocial choice as a fictitious concept, namely that while majorities, leaders, caucuses, governments etc. can make choices for society (except in unanimous plebiscites about simple proximate alternatives), choices cannot be made by society. No operative meaning can be credited to such statements as "society has chosen a certain allocation of resources." There is no method for ascertaining whether "society" preferred the allocation in question, and no mechanism by which it could have chosen what
   

it supposedly preferred. It is always possible to agree to some question-begging convention whereby certain actual choices made for society shall be called "social choices," for instance if they are reached by the mechanism of a state mandated by majority vote. The convention will create a fictitious concept, whose use cannot fail to bias further discourse.

There may, in addition, be other reasons for objecting to the concept in particular circumstances. If a certain pattern of redistribution is addictive like drug-taking, it is a euphemism to say that society "chooses" to maintain or accentuate that pattern. At bottom, this is the general problem of today's wants substantially depending on their satisfaction yesterday and through all previous history (cf. also pp. 20-1). We should, however, recall that addiction is not the only conceivable relation between what we get and what we want. There is a range of possibilities between the extremes of addiction and allergy. The proper field of choice theories is the middle region of the range. But even in the middle, it is not "society" that chooses.

1. I am choosing the example of the bus because it makes thefree-rider problem more palpable, and not because I believe that buses can only be provided cooperatively. A universe where all buses are run by private operators for a profit is conceivable. A universe where this is true of streets may not be conceivable.
   
 

1. This thesis is put in Mancur Olson, The Logic of CollectiveAction, 1965, p. 36. Cf. also the same author's The Rise and Decline of Nations, 1982, for the argument that "encompassing organizations," e.g. the association of all labour unions, all manufacturers or all shopkeepers in a corporative state, "own so much of the society that they have an important incentive to be actively concerned in how productive it is" (p. 48), i.e. to behave
   
2. responsibly. The encompassing organization is to society as a person is to a small group.
   
 

2. For a review of various authors' contrasting conclusions aboutthe effect of group size on free riding within the group, cf. Russell Hardin, Collective Action, 1982, p. 44.
   
 

3. It is perhaps tempting, in this light, to regard interest groups asminiature states and the theory of the state as a case in some general theory of interest groups. If we did this, the traditional dividing line in political theory between state of nature and civil society would get washed away. There are major objections to such an approach. (1) The state has a unique attribute-sovereignty.
   

(2)
The approach is question-begging. It treats as axiomatic thatfor the potential members of the "group" (i.e. all members of society), "group reward" exceeds "group burden," i.e. there is a pay-off from tackling the free-rider problem. But how does the pay-off manifest itself? It is usually accepted that the pay-off from forming a trade union is higher wages or shorter hours, and the pay-off from forming a cartel is excess profits. The pay-off from the social contract is the realization of the general will, obviously a different category of pay-off; even its algebraic sign depends entirely on the values of the interpreter of the general will-the Sympathetic Observer of the "social welfare function." (3) The theory of interest group formation may have room for the state which only imposes cooperative solutions that make some better off and none worse off. It has not enough room for the state that imposes solutions that make some better and others worse off, i.e. that is a group redistributing benefits within itself. Nor is it suited to accommodate the state that has its own maximand, pursues its own ends in opposition to its subjects.

The very enumeration of what could or could not be adequately handled by assimilating the state to interest groups with coercive
features shows what a strait-jacket the contractarian approach is for the theory of the state.

1. For the fundamental difference between "groups" (includingpolitical communities) where people can "vote with their feet" and others where they cannot, see Albert Hirschman, Exit, Voice and Loyalty, 1970.
   
 

2. K. Marx, "The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte," in
   

K.
Marx and F. Engels, Selected Works in One Volume, 1968, p.169.

1. Like the American senator, referring to the deliberations of theSenate Finance Committee: "A billion here, a billion there and before long you are talking real money." My source is hearsay, but "se non e vero, e ben trovato."
   
 

2. Cf. W. Wallace, "The Pressure Group Phenomenon," in BrianFrost (ed.), The Tactics of Pressure, 1975, pp. 93-4. Wallace also makes the point that causes feed on the mass media and the mass media feed on causes, from which it may be possible to infer further that some kind of cumulative process might get going even in the absence of the state. Would, however, people in the state of nature watch so much television? That is, isn't the habit of prolonged television-watching a product, in part, of people being less interested in doing state-of-nature things, either because it is no fun any more or because the state is doing them instead?
   
 

3. Samuel Brittan, The Role and Limits of Government: Essaysin Political Economy, 1983.
   
 

1. Madame de Pompadour would spend all her income on Sèvreschina, and the rest of the people all their income on salt if the salt tax was set high enough to leave them no money for anything
   
2. else. Note that since the demand for salt does not vary with its price, taxing it (rather than articles in more elastic demand) should not cause much distortion! Nevertheless, as all the national income is spent on salt and china, we may judge that it would be reduced by the salt tax.
   
 

4. It is anyway difficult to think of a pure public good whichcould not at all be produced in the state of nature, though it is arguable that goods with a high degree of "publicness" would be produced on a "sub-optimal" scale. However, the very notion of an optimal scale is more fragile than it looks, if only because tastes for public goods may well depend on how they are produced, e.g. politics may breed a taste for political solutions, and make people forget how to solve their problems by cooperating spontaneously.
   
 

5. Explicitly, I think, since 1959, the publication of R. A.Musgrave's basic textbook The Theory of Public Finance.
   
 

6. I have noted (p. 172), dealing with Rawls's distributive justiceand the "background institutions" that go with it, a particularly stark form of this supposition.
   
 

1. Contrast the position taken by Nozick, Anarchy, State andUtopia, p. 27: "We might elliptically call an arrangement 'redistributive' if its major... supporting reasons are themselves redistributive.... Whether we say an institution that takes money from some and gives it to others is redistributive depends upon why we think it does so." This view would not recognize unintentional, incidental, perverse redistributions, and may or may not regard our "direct churning" as redistribution. Its interest is not in whether certain arrangements do redistribute resources, but in whether they were meant to.
   
2. The distinction may be interesting for some purposes. It recalls the one the courts make between premeditated murder and manslaughter, a distinction which is more significant to the accused than to the victim.
   
 

7. The calculus seems to work out the other way round in states,notably in Africa, where the rural population is physically too cut off from politics and it is best to sacrifice agricultural interests to the urban proletariat, the state employees, the soldiers, etc. by a policy of low farm prices.
   
 

1. P. Mathias, The First Industrial Nation, 1969, pp. 87-8, listsBritish policies to help the textile industry; the Corn Laws; the ban on the export of sheep and wool; the bounty on the export of beer and of malt; the ban on the import of the latter; the Navigation Acts, etc. as examples of measures where one industry was helped at the expense of another and vice versa. Professor Mathias remarks that this would look inconsistent and irrational if the economic policy of the era were to be regarded as a logically organized system.
   
 

2. A crazy quilt of cross-subsidization, etc. may, however, have a perfectly adequate political logic of its own, for all that it is self-contradictory as an "economic" policy.
   
 

1. Even the most basic, direct "net" redistributive arrangementcan mislead, causing mischief all round, as Tocqueville has noted. The landowning nobility of continental Europe attached great value to their tax exemption, and commoners resented it. True to form, Tocqueville recognized that in reality the tax came out of the rent of the noble's land, whether it was technically he or his serfs or farmers who paid it. Yet both the nobles and the commoners were led and misled, in their political attitudes, by the
   
2. apparent inequality of treatment rather than by its real incidence (L'ancien régime et la révolution, 1967, pp. 165-6).
   
 

1. Randall Bartlett, Economic Foundations of Political Power,1973, makes the related point that governments seek to mislead voters by producing biased information about public expenditures, taxes, etc. It seems fair to add that the cost-of-living indices and unemployment statistics of some modern states are not above suspicion either. One might reflect further on the conditions under which a rational state would choose selectively to publish truthful statistics, lies and no statistics, allowing for the effort needed to keep secrets (especially selectively), the inconvenience of the right hand not knowing what the left is doing, and the risks involved in coming to believe one's own lies. The right mix of truth, falsehood and silence looks very difficult to achieve-even the Soviet Union, which chooses its preferred "mix" more freely than most other states, seems to have mixed itself a poisonous brew.
   
 

2. The fostering of systematic error by mendacious statistics, however, is kid's stuff compared to some of its other forms. In the development and propagation of a dominant ideology, defined as one favourable to the state's purposes, systematic error is generally being fostered without conscious design, i.e. far more effectively and durably than by mere lying. For instance, the powerful notion that the state is an instrument in the hands of its citizens (whether of all citizens, of the majority or of the propertied class) has certainly not originated in any Ministry of Propaganda. Educators inculcating doctrines of the state producing public good, and the requisite norms of good citizenship, are doing so in all sincerity.
   
 

1. As I write (1984), the jury is still out on the Reaganadministration and Mrs Thatcher's government. Both seem at the
   
2. same time to be rolling and not rolling back the state. Comparing their strong commitment on the one hand and the slightness of the result on the other, one is reminded of the irresistible force meeting the immovable object.
   
 

8. Historiography tends to deal more satisfactorily with statesappearing in the shape of kings and emperors than with states which are faceless institutions. All too often, the latter are confused with the country, the nation; the historical driving force springing from the conflict between state and civil society is left at the edge of the field of vision. When the game is Emperor vs Senate, the king and his burghers vs the nobility, or the king vs established privileges and "ancient freedoms," historians are less apt to make us lose sight of which interests make the state do what it does.
   
 

9. In modern parlance, the labourer has "maximized" whenaccepting to work for subsistence wages. No better alternative was offered to him. A different, more "strategic" sense of maximization, however, would have him attempt to influence the available alternatives. He could try to organize a union and bargain collectively, or strike. He could seek redress in "distributive justice" through the democratic political process. He could also fall in behind the "vanguard of the working class" and join the struggle to modify the "relations of production."
   
 

1. If it takes the application of a fixed "amount" of power to stayin power, with the surplus (if any) available for exercise at discretion, anything which maximizes power must also maximize the discretionary surplus. The fastidious may therefore wince at "discretionary power" as the maximand; why not just plain power?
   
2. However, the convenience of a built-in separation between "being in power" and "using power to freely chosen ends" seems to me to outweigh the inelegance of the solution. If the maximand is discretionary power, we can describe competitive equilibrium in politics as the position where discretionary power is nil. This has the didactic merit of rhyming with the position of the perfectly competitive firm whose profit is nil after it has paid for all its factors of production.
   
 

10. Political theory, as we have seen, asks questions of ateleological nature and treats the state as an instrument: What can states do for their citizens? What ought they to do? What are the obligations and limits of civil obedience?, etc. I know of only two serious precedents of attributing a maximand to the state itself. Both do so in the context of theorizing about the production of public goods. One is Albert Breton, The Economic Theory of Representative Government, 1974. He postulates that the majority party will behave so as to maximize a function increasing in some way with the chance of re-election, power, personal gain, image in history and its view of the common good. The other is Richard Auster and Morris Silver, The State as a Firm, 1979. Here the maximand is the difference between tax revenue and the cost of the public goods produced by the state. Auster and Silver hold that unlike monarchy or oligarchy, democracy amounts to "diffuse ownership" among politicians and bureaucrats, and hence there is no residual income-recipient to profit from a surplus of taxes over the cost of public goods (leading to their over-production). I would interpret this to mean that in democracy there is no "maximizer."