A Cry from the Far Middle

You’d be making tacos by rolling liverwurst in Aunt Jemima pancakes and seasoning it with pumpkin pie spice. The grocery store requires free speech to advertise its specials. You could be paying twice as much for the corn tortillas as you would have paid at the other grocery store down the road. Except, without property rights, there might not be another grocery store down the road. In fact there might not be any grocery stores at all. You’ll have to wait for dinner until there’s a government taco handout. Furthermore, absent rule of law, just how old is that guacamole? And lastly, although you might not think representative democracy would come into play at the checkout counter, what if a certain kind of doofus becomes America’s Augustus Caesar and the kid who’s bagging your groceries double bags the Dos Equis six-pack and gets—as they call it these days—canceled for not sequestering your carbon?

O tempora! O mores!

Big Fat Politics

At the beginning of 2019 we had a thirty-five-day “government shutdown.” For those with more or less libertarian views (myself included) this was a be-careful-what-you-wish-for moment.

Not that it didn’t seem like a perfectly good time to shut the government down, what with the ongoing political bumfuzzlement—bum in the White House and fuzzlement in Congress.

But what I personally had in mind was more like senators and representatives going to payday lenders, cabinet members sleeping under bridges, and the president of the United States selling his wife’s Manolo Blahniks on Shopify to pay the pizza delivery boy at state dinners.

Instead we got very crabby unpaid TSA agents who would have strip-searched me right in the middle of Dulles Airport if there hadn’t been a long line of people at the security checkpoint begging not to see me naked.

We got Yellowstone Park rangers pawning the bears to make car payments. National Gallery curators chalking pictures on the sidewalk hoping someone would drop a quarter in their hat. And grade school field trips where the closest the kids came to a tour of the Capitol building was looking at a picture of it on the back of the $50 bills that lobbyists charge per minute.

Because the lobbyists weren’t closed for business. And neither was any other high muck-a-muck, big noise, or Chief Itch-and-Rub in Washington. Government shutdown? Our government is so bad at everything that it can’t even do nothing right.

And how did our government get so bad? Bad politics. But how did our politics get so bad? Politics grew worse because politics grew.

Sometimes when things grow it’s good—when the grown kids finally move out of the house. But sometimes when things grow it’s a growth. It’s a tumor. We have a gigantic political tumor. I’m not optimistic about the biopsy.

Here I enter a definitional quagmire, and excuse me while I drag you along. The growth of politics is not the same as the growth of government. Our government is a bit of a wide load and a pie wagon and giving it the Peloton Wife treatment would be a good idea. On the other hand, there are about 330 million of us in a country with a $19 trillion GDP. As to bulk, our government will always be more defensive tackle than bag of bones special-teams player kicking punts.

And government being bad is not so bad as politics being bad. In fact, our government isn’t as bad as I say it is. It’s just a human institution, with all the human failings that entails. (I say it’s bad because I’m a political pundit, with all the human failings that entails.) Our government is probably as good—maybe better—than any other human institution its size. Although there are no other human institutions its size. China’s equivalent to the U.S. federal budget is only slightly more than half of ours. And, much as I dislike Trump, I wouldn’t trade him for Xi Jinping. (Not even if I lived in Miami and the Chinese threw in the really good defensive tackle that the Dolphins need.)

Government and politics are different. Government is . . . words fail me . . . government. Politics is the fight over who runs the government. And the fix is in because, as you may have noticed, every time politicians stage that fight a politician wins.

The growth of politics is the opposite of the growth of liberty. When liberty grows we get increased individual enterprise and expansion of free markets. We create more goods, services, and benefits to society. The pie gets bigger.

But politics is not about creating more goods, services, and benefits to society. Politics is about dividing them up.

Politics is about promising things to people. “The auction of goods about to be stolen,” as H. L. Mencken put it.

The promises are lies, of course. But it isn’t just the qualitative untruth of a lie that matters. The quantitative untruth matters too. When politics is a minor contest, a backyard tussle, it promises a few things to a few people. Naturally they’re disappointed. But it’s just a few people, a trifling number of beggars with “will vote for food” signs squatting at the polls looking for political handouts (and batting each other over the head with their pieces of cardboard). If they get a cup of joe when they thought they were going to get a chicken dinner, no big deal. (Or “New Deal.” Or “Fair Deal.” Or “Great Society.”)

We survived those growths in the size of politics. But politics had just begun to go Baconator. Now politics is at the point of promising everything to everybody.

And everybody is disappointed. Everybody goes away empty-handed. Everybody feels cheated.

Does this make us mad at our politicians? Yes. But mostly it makes us mad at each other, because politics is a zero-sum game the way freedom and free markets are not. Zero-sum games are not played for kicks and giggles. Zero-sum games are blood sports.

Yes, there’s competition in free markets. That’s what makes them work. Competition is the vermouth in the