Moxy Frügal

It's hard not to look at the U.S. Constitution -- objectively and without bias regarding what a government ought to be or do -- without concluding that today -- January 18, 2007 -- the United States Government is well advanced on its way to being something completely other than that which was intended yea those many years ago. The America of bygone times was a decentralized federation of self-reliant states and self-reliant people. America today cleaves much closer to an advanced welfare state with massive taxation, spending, entitlements and financial commitments extending into a future we know very little about.

Inevitable entropy might explain this advance of statism. The idea that entropy -- the quantity of energy in a system that is not available for useful work (or more accessibly, a system's degree of disorder) -- applies not only to the science of heat and mechanical power but to every facet of existence is not a new one. In his 1927 book The Nature of the Physical World, Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington avows:

The law that entropy always increases, holds, I think, the supreme position among the laws of Nature. If someone points out to you that your pet theory of the universe is in disagreement with Maxwell's equations -- then so much the worse for Maxwell's equations. If it is found to be contradicted by observation -- well, those experimentalists do bungle things sometimes. But if your theory is found to be against the second law of thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation.

The defunct Thornhill geek rock group Moxy Früvous actually had a song about entropy whose whimsical lyrics went something like this:

It's entropy you see that turns finesse into mess,
A palace to a pigstye, why it's simply scandalous!
Energy once neat turns into to waste heat
(We must repeat!)
Because of entropy

Moxy Früvous was a bunch of socialists so, even though we love them for their früvolous songs, we must take a quote from a fellow who's against decreasing available energy. To that end, Thomas Jefferson hands us the pithiest observation on the phenomenon of entropy growing over time even in man-made political structures:

The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain.

Though Thomas said that at a time when government barely had a beachhead in America, its accuracy isn't so much from prescience as from the man's clear understanding of a segment of history that has repeated itself again and again. From this vantage, trying to push back against ballooning bureaucracies, even if only to stall them rather than force a retreat, seems like a hopeless task. Particularly because a government that engages in "programs" and "services" is like a snowball rolling down a mountain -- the growth is self-sustaining. Government jobs are jobs for life. One reason: once you're employed by Big Government, you vote Big Government because your vote is a vote to stay employed. The more people as a percentage of a population employed by Big Government, the fewer votes there are in play that might dislodge it. The perduring character of public employment leads many people to seek it out on purpose, including many of a torpid sort loathe to do much actual work. If life is a "Simpsons" episode, then government is Lyle Lanley and his monorail:

Barney: What about us brain-dead slobs?
Lanley: You'll be given cushy jobs!

Thus the fact that it cannot really shrink makes it grow.

Sometimes voters do get midly concerned about the size of their government's obligations and, ergo, their own present and future tax bills. As often as not, though, they'll fall for the dulcet tones of a "middle-of-the-road" group of "centrist" politicians playing what Bruce Bartlett calls the old [political] game: calling reductions in the rate of spending growth a 'cut'. When more radical would-be shrinkers find themselves in office, they generally also find themselves on a leash so short they can only tinker with line-items here and there. However, sooner or later, for whatever reason, somebody does try to reduce the size of a piece of government a bit. Spendthrift tax-heavy socialist wunderkind Pierre Trudeau actually tried this, though it was only because fiscal reality reared its ugly head, forcing him to back off his expansion plans to regroup a bit. Unfortunately for Trudeau (actually, it was more unfortunate for the taxpayers really...), he ran up against the world's worst memoirist, Mr. John K. Starnes.

In his autobiography Closely Guarded, which reads like an excruciating list of lunch dates with boring people that I Mostly Disregarded, Starnes does toss out one revealing passage:

Being assistant deputy minister in charge of the department's administration kept me busy. ... The most discouraging [change] was the evident desire of Pierre Trudeau to whittle down External Affairs. His method was to make an arbitrary percentage cut to our budget and to tell us to get on with the job. Mitchell Sharp seemed unwilling to make an issue of the matter with his colleagues, particularly Trudeau. Ministers were not happy, however, when we responded by proposing that some of our missions be closed. Since a considerable percentage of our annual budget was given over to salaries¹ and allowances, closing a few missions and reallocating the personnel affected appeared preferable to widespread layoffs, with all the personal and other problems attendant on such action.

There you have it. Cutting jobs is never fun nor is it a matter to be taken lightly². On the other hand, here we have a decision by the elected representative of the people of Canada (the public) handed to the chief assistant deputy minister in charge of obstruction³, a public servant and he comes up with two mutually exclusive plans:

1. Either maintain a bloated payroll -- not exactly the department's mission,
2. Or maintain foreign legations -- more or less exactly the purpose of Foreign Affairs

And he chooses option one, crippling any possibility of reducing the size of government in any meaningful way. Loyalty to public servants trumps loyalty to the public.

So how irreversible is the creeping size of government, what are its effects, and how pointless the effort to shrink it? The Reagan soundbite apocryphally ascribed to Alexander Fraser Tytler isn't too optimistic:

A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largess of the public treasury...

Not exactly a sparkling outlook, that. Common sense says we should resist growth of government to the utmost because to do so is right and success -- if temporary -- is always possible. In the end, government frügality can't be Moxy Früitless. The tendency to expand isn't overwhelming (even if it is very very whelming!); individual people can still influence events. We just have to remember to keep our sanity when we fail and maybe get a little guilty schadenfreude from watching the EUtopian countries most far progressed into nanny-statism collapse in slow motion beneath their own distended corpulence.

¹: My emphasis.
²: Though it should be noted there are win-win ways to approach the problem that leave both the layer-off and the layed-off reasonably happy.
³: Lest there be any confusion on this point, this is a civil servant's posting, not that of an elected representative.