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IDEOLOGY AND ETHICS SURVEY SAMPLE ARGUMENTS |
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| 21. |
Should we incentivize public servants with the perquisites of expanded government, or be more concerned that they will abuse these things? |
| (- 5) Centralization (caretakership-early life cycle protection) viewpoint: Government size should correspond with the wealth, prestige, and power of a people. Talking about "too much government" is like saying someone is too rich, drives too nice a car, and lives in too big a mansion. How many people do you know want to give up having lots of money? Similarly, government monuments and ceremonies provide a sense of grandeur. How can one have too much magnificence any more than one can say a symphony sounds too beautiful? How do you criticize people for being powerful enough to get a lot more good things accomplished than the average citizen? In addition, a large government can develop special feedback channels and acquire extra staff to respond to grass roots complaints just like small government. The bigger issue here may be whether a sense of caretakership exists among those at the top. In Democracy: The God That Failed, author Dr. Hans Herman-Hoppe argues that a monarch who is incentivized to have a sense of caretakership from privately owning government may be more responsible in the long run than most elected officials in a social democracy. Officials who serve limited terms may feel incentivized to recklessly spend taxpayer's money to make names for themselves while they are in office. They may not care if they run up the public debt, because this becomes someone else's problem after they leave office. In contrast, under a more autocratic system with longer tenure in office, the leaders might feel more secure, have the luxury of taking a broader perspective, and become less likely to play corrupt political games just to survive. This reasoning has similarities to the concept of providing tenure to professors so that they can feel more secure about staying focused on their work and saying what they really believe. Sometimes you require a certain level of size, structure, and stability within organizations before various good things can begin to mature and become sustainable. In contrast, it can be counterproductive to make things too competitive and starve people for resources to the point that they become desperate. What good is it if on the one hand you tell people to be visionary patriotic public servants, and then on the other you throw them to the wolves like they are running a hot dog stand? |
. . . | (+5) The decentralization (distrustful libertarian) view: We should never ignore the fact that there are very few things government can do better or more efficiently than the private sector. It may be true that on an idealistic level, as the size and perks of government grow, government leaders should feel appreciative and incentivized to work that much harder to serve the people. More staff resources should theoretically provide greater wisdom. Unfortunately, there is a huge disconnect between the ability of a government to raise revenue and its performance that is easily exploited by opportunistic people. Government forces people to permanently "subscribe" to its general services at the point of a gun through its police power. Often when government programs fail, it responds by raising taxes and creating even more programs to overcome the failures. This rarely happens in the private sector where companies with bad products usually go out of business. In contrast, left on their own, even bad government bureaucracies tend to steadily grow if left unchecked. Particularly unprincipled government operators create false crises as excuses to aggrandize their own departments. Furthermore, once officials get used to certain perks and government size, they tend to create unnecessary projects to prevent cut-backs. This is particularly true when they can get kick backs by extending special privileges to cronies in the private sector. It may be true that enhancing a sense of grandeur and caretakership among government officials might incentivize them to work harder and be more responsible to the people, but these things can also backfire. There is a much greater danger that unscrupulous officials can shield themselves from legitimate criticism behind a wall of phony patriotism (jingoism). Once bureaucracies become infested with scoundrels, they are very hard to root out. Why take that risk? It is much better to keep government relatively small and on a tight leash before the general public.
Conversely, once government grows beyond a certain point, the very nature of it invites parasitic infestation. Lastly, people should be responsible on their own for finding jobs where they do not become so desperate that it degrades their ability to act honestly and responsibly. |
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