Politicians are forever promising to fix things. Perhaps every such
promise should be interrupted by a prior question:
Who could solve this without government—and what could government do to help them try?
I began thinking about this because I kept encountering small stories
about people doing rather brilliant things.
Someone saw hungry people in a park and fed them.
Someone running an animal sanctuary had more work than she could manage
and an unused cabin. Someone else needed somewhere to live. Housing,
electricity and wireless service could be exchanged for an agreed amount
of work.
An older woman was lonely, worried about the cost of retirement, and had
land. Other older women wanted affordable places for their small homes
without surrendering their independence. She began creating a community
that could answer several of those needs at once.
None of these arrangements is consequence-free. Nothing involving other
people is. That may be the point we ought to establish before discussing
government at all.
The person feeding people can leave a mess. The housing-for-work
arrangement can produce a dispute. The tiny-home community can create
effects beyond its property line. Private actors can be selfish,
incompetent, exclusionary or simply wrong.
Government can be wrong too.
Authority does not remove consequences. It chooses a different bundle of
them, and because government can compel, prohibit, tax and enforce, its
bundle deserves unusually explicit accounting.
A problem is not yet a jurisdiction
The park example became more interesting when I learned that some of the
complaints were real. There had been concerns about sanitation,
bathrooms, crowding and the effect on other people using the area.
That changes the case. It does not finish it.
A demonstrated problem establishes the need to respond. It does not
automatically establish what the response should be.
If litter is the problem, can volunteers clean it? If bathrooms are the
problem, can nearby businesses or portable facilities solve it? If too
many people arrive at once, can times or locations change? Let the
people doing the work propose corrections. Observe whether they work.
Add a narrow condition if they do not.
The proper response to a recoverable local problem need not begin at the
same point as the response to a hidden, catastrophic or irreversible
risk.
A little bridge on private property used by the people who built it is
one thing. A bridge carrying hundreds of strangers who cannot evaluate
its structural safety is another. The object is the same; consent,
information, scale and consequence are not.
So the question is not simply whether risk exists. Risk always exists.
The question is how much authority this particular risk justifies.
Consequences, relocated
Regulation is often discussed as though it removes the tradeoff.
Without regulation, something bad might happen. Therefore regulate it.
But the intervention has consequences too: compliance costs, barriers to
entry, administrative expense, lost experimentation, selective
enforcement, opportunities that never come into existence, and taxes or
other costs dispersed among people who may never see the bill.
A cost has not disappeared merely because it moved off the
decision-maker’s ledger.
This is why “compared with what?” matters so much. We should not compare
the actual failures of private action with the intended benefits of
government action. Nor should limited-government advocates compare the
failures of regulation with an imaginary private world in which everyone
behaves beautifully.
Everybody’s ledger stays open.
History supplies uncomfortable examples in both directions. Private
mutual-aid and fraternal systems once provided sickness benefits and
medical care through local associations. Some were durable and
remarkably responsive; some were not. Medical reform answered genuine
problems of poor training and information asymmetry, while professional
organizations also had incentives to suppress lower-cost competitors.
Modern alternatives have reappeared with problems of their own.
That history does not hand us a clean winner.
It gives us a warning against pretending that one failure proves the
other system has solved failure itself.
A past failure proves that failure is possible. It does not prove that
transferring authority eliminates failure. It may only change its form.
Government as connector before proprietor
The private examples that first caught my attention were not interesting
because private people are automatically wiser than public institutions.
They were interesting because people close to a problem could see
combinations a generalized program might miss.
Food met hunger.
Housing met labor.
Land met affordability, independence and companionship.
The pieces already existed.
Perhaps one useful function of local government is to help the pieces
find one another before deciding that government itself must own the
solution.
A town could make existing groups, volunteers, land, expertise, grants,
donated materials and successful experiments easy to discover. It could
tell someone with an idea what problems similar efforts encountered and
what rules genuinely apply. It could connect people with complementary
needs. It could help resolve collisions when they arise.
Wildlife rehabilitators offer a particularly odd example of the opposite
arrangement. Government may license and inspect private rehabilitators,
list them publicly, and send residents to them when injured wildlife is
found, while providing little help with release land, volunteers,
transport, supplies or other resources the work requires.
That can amount to: we will regulate your private capacity and then use
it as a public resource.
If public institutions rely on civic capacity, they should have some
obligation to cultivate it.
For many ordinary social problems, government could be an early
connector, a later referee, and only when necessary the primary solver.
Limited government has a maintenance requirement
There is an inconvenient side to this argument. If people want decisions
kept closer to individuals, voluntary associations and local
communities, people at those levels have to participate.
“Somebody else deal with it” is an excellent fertilizer for centralized
authority.
But participation cannot reasonably require professional citizenship.
Information may be technically public while remaining functionally
inaccessible: the right department, the right newsletter, a 146-page
PDF, a three-hour meeting on Tuesday evening, and the discovery that the
meaningful negotiation happened six weeks earlier.
Transparency therefore means more than publication. An ordinary person
should be able to discover what is changing, why, what tradeoffs are
being considered, when the decision will be made, what alternatives
remain available, and how to participate while participation can still
affect the result.
Publicity is not transparency. Participation after the important choices
have closed is reaction.
The same principle should apply to regulation itself. A citizen ought to
be able to ask:
What harm is this rule addressing? Why does government have
jurisdiction? Why this level of government? What outcome is required?
Who benefits? Who bears the costs? What alternatives are allowed? What
would have to become true for this rule no longer to be justified?
Page 242 may occasionally be necessary. Engineers sometimes need page
242. Citizens should not need it merely to discover why government is
interfering with them.
Permanent ink should be earned
Rules generalize because individualized judgment costs money. That is a
real tradeoff. A simple rule can also constrain arbitrary discretion;
the six-foot fence rule may be crude, but at least Karen cannot decide
that five feet eleven inches is tasteful at Carol’s house and a threat
to civilization at mine.
So the answer is not simply fewer detailed rules and more discretion.
A better pattern may be a clear purpose, a standard safe route for
people who want it, and an accessible alternative route for someone who
can demonstrate that the purpose is satisfied another way.
If the rule exists to control stormwater runoff, tell me that. If my
unusual surface can demonstrably meet the runoff requirement, let me
show it. If there is another reason it still must be prohibited, name
that reason too.
Keep the intent loud.
And new regulation should not receive permanent ink merely because it
survived enactment. Where practical, begin provisionally. State the
purpose and expected tradeoff. Review early while uncertainty is high.
If the intervention repeatedly works at acceptable cost, lengthen the
review interval. Stable engineering knowledge may justify a long
interval; rules built on uncertain predictions or rapidly changing
technology should have a shorter presumption of validity.
“Permanent” should mean durable, not immortal.
The relevant question at review is not merely whether the original
problem still exists. It is whether, given what we know now, this rule
remains a tolerable response to it.
The permission problem
More than twenty years ago, when I was homeschooling my son, a
grocery-store cashier saw us during the school day and asked whether
there was no school.
“We homeschool,” I said.
She looked genuinely startled.
“The government lets you?”
I have remembered that question ever since.
It was not hostile. That was what made it interesting. Freedom had
quietly become something she imagined government granting rather than
something government needed a reason to restrict.
The fiscal version is familiar too. We call a public service “free” when
we mean that the price is pooled, deferred or paid through another
route. TANSTAAFL remains an irritatingly useful acronym: there ain’t no
such thing as a free lunch.
The danger is not merely that government may become too large. Citizens
can become less practiced at asking what authority is for, what it
costs, and whether the arrangement still earns their consent.
That is another reason transparency and participation matter. They keep
the citizen in the relationship as a participant rather than merely a
recipient, taxpayer, regulated provider or complainant.
No consequence-free solutions
Limited government is sometimes heard as indifference: leave people
alone and let the consequences fall where they may.
That is not what I mean.
Government has important work where force, fraud, broken agreements,
rights, serious external harms, public goods, catastrophic risks and
problems of scale genuinely require collective authority. Local
institutions can be petty, captured, discriminatory and wrong. Private
solutions can fail badly.
But government should not get an Easy Button merely because its stated
purpose is public.
There are no consequence-free solutions to living with other people.
Your preferred arrangement has costs. Mine has costs. Government’s has
costs. Private action’s has costs. Reasonable people may even look at
the same ledger and weight its entries differently.
That should make us more demanding about evidence and more tolerant of
disagreement.
Keep authority as close as the consequences reasonably permit. Make its
purpose comprehensible. Count what the intervention prevents and what it
prevents from happening. Let people propose alternatives. Make
participation cheap enough to be ordinary. Review what we build.
Escalate when the evidence requires it.
And when government says, “We will fix this,” ask the prior question:
Who could solve this without government—and what could government do to help them try?
Not because every attempt will work, but because government does not remove the wobble from living together. At
its best, it helps us decide—visibly, proportionately and
repeatedly—where we are willing to carry it.