US government: Too "big" or too "weak"?

[Vouthon]

Is the United States Federal government too “big”, as many American conservatives claim or in fact “too weak” for the tasks it must face, as argued by some high-profile political scientists like Francis Fukuyama?

One often hears American political pundits decry the advent of “big government”, yet the US political system has far more checks and balances in place than most democracies and there are many who think it has decayed to the point of becoming a slave to powerful lobbies - both on the left and the right of the political spectrum - along with clientelistic interests.

To this Francis Fukuyama, himself an American conservative, argues the following:

democracyrenewal.edu.au/rise-and-fall-us-government

**Fukuyama argues that the United States was a modern, effective state, but it has been ‘decomposing’ since the 1970s due to a number of factors including:

• Wealthy individuals and interest groups are able to excessively influence public policy through campaign contributions and lobbying

• Lack of investment in a well-resourced, well-trained professional bureaucracy

• Lack of autonomy in government agencies to develop and implement policy

• Excessive checks and balances that create a ‘vetocracy’, where those that benefit from the status quo can block any change.**

Surprisingly for someone generally identified as a conservative, Fukuyama argues that the U.S. federal government is not too strong, but in fact too weak.

Dilulio takes Fukuyama’s argument somewhat further. He includes a graph that shows the number of federal public service employees has remained flat at roughly 2.25 million since 1960 in spite of the U.S. federal budget growing over five-fold in real dollars in that time. The U.S. Congress has masked this massive increase in spending and scope by paying three types of proxies – state & local government workers, for-profit businesses and non-profit organisations – to administer an enormous array of policies, programs and regulations.

This is the kind of governmental degradation warned against by Pope Pius XI in his 1931 encyclical Quadregesimo Anno:

“…The ultimate consequences of the individualist spirit in economic life are those which you yourselves, Venerable Brethren and Beloved Children, see and deplore: Free competition has destroyed itself; economic dictatorship has supplanted the free market; unbridled ambition for power has likewise succeeded greed for gain; all economic life has become tragically hard, inexorable, and cruel. To these are to be added the grave evils that have resulted from an intermingling and shameful confusion of the functions and duties of public authority with those of the economic sphere - such as, one of the worst, the virtual degradation of the majesty of the State, which although it ought to sit on high like a queen and supreme arbitress, free from all partiality and intent upon the one common good and justice, is become a slave, surrendered and delivered to the passions and greed of men…”

- Pope Pius XI (Quadragesimo Anno), 1931

So I pose the very controversial question: is the US government too big or too weak?

 

[Vouthon]

washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/januaryfebruary_2015/on_political_books/the_rise_and_fall_of_the_us_go053474.php?page=all

January/February 2015

**The Rise and Fall of the U.S. Government

While other conservatives say that the American state has become too powerful, Francis Fukuyama argues that it has grown too weak**

By John J. Dilulio Jr.

…

“While the American economy remains a source of miraculous innovation, American government is hardly a source of inspiration around the world at the present moment.”

Despite the Kennedys, Bushes, and Clintons, America is safely past overt nepotism and other neopatrimonial practices. Instead, over the last half century, America’s political decay has been fueled by what Fukuyama characterizes as a new “tribalism” that authorizes influence peddling at the highest levels of modern politics. American government, Fukuyama declares, is now dominated by “interest groups that are able to effectively buy politicians with campaign contributions and lobbying.” This perfectly legal vote buying is an insidious form of “clientelism” practiced with huge sums of money and at a much larger scale than ever before. Congress is now controlled by politicians who raise money and win reelection by granting political favors to their supporters…

Afflicted by deep polarization among elites and mass mistrust of government, America’s repatrimonialized republic has descended into what Fukuyama terms a “vetocracy,” a paralytic liberal democratic regime in which not even clear and present fiscal, foreign, or other dangers elicit sound and timely policy decisions.

That the federal government has become paralyzed, dysfunctional, and captured by moneyed elites is, of course, not news. Fukuyama’s contribution is to situate this condition within a grand historical analysis of how nations and political systems advance and decline. It is also noteworthy that his analysis runs counter to the views of most contemporary conservative thinkers, among whom Fukuyama is usually grouped. America’s dilemma is not that its central government is too powerful, says Fukuyama, but that it has grown too weak…

In America, respect for the rule of law was present at the nation’s creation. The country also democratized early, opening the vote to all white males in the 1820s, decades before any country in Europe. But it was relatively slow to create autonomous, impartial state bureaucracies thanks to a national temperament that militated against central governmental authority.

Instead, starting in the Jacksonian period, the Founders’ patrimonial “elite patronage system” was converted into “a mass clientelistic one” characterized by the “trading of votes and political support for individual benefits rather than programmatic policies.” Think of urban political bosses passing out Christmas turkeys, or the scenes in the recent movie Lincoln in which Honest Abe’s shadowy henchmen secure the support of lame-duck Democrat congressmen for the Thirteenth Amendment with offers of jobs as federal postmasters, and you get the idea. Clientism, Fukuyama observes, occurs “when democracy arrives before a modern state has had time to consolidate into an autonomous institution with its own supporting political coalition.” It is thus best understood as “an early form of democracy.”

Though some state building occurred through Lincoln’s prosecution of the Civil War, for decades America retained a clientelistic government by “courts and parties,” not a “centralized, bureaucratic, and autonomous state of the sort that had been created in Prussia, France, and Britain.” Only toward the end of the nineteenth century did the United States begin the decades-long process of central state building. But whereas in Europe as well as China, strong professionalized bureaucracies evolved as defenses against military threats, in America they arose from internal political struggle, specifically the Progressive Movement. Fukuyama credits Progressive reformers, allied intellectual elites, and their middle-class minions with sending America’s patrimonialism and clientelism packing, at least for a half century or so…

The Progressives succeeded through measures that included the Pendleton Act of 1883, the expansion of the federal civil service system, and the dawn of professionalized state and local government agencies. Progressive reformers, and later those of the New Deal, “tried to construct a European-style administrative state.” But they did so against an ingrained national suspicion of “Big Government.”

Still, despite Progressive reform efforts that were backed by forceful leaders including Teddy Roosevelt, the “end of the patronage system at the federal level did not arrive until the middle of the twentieth century.” Even then, most Americans and their leaders mistrusted government and refused to “delegate to the government authority to make decisions in the manner of other democratic societies.”.…He blames the ICC’s sorry record on “the design of the American state, with its complex system of checks and balances.”

 

[DaveBj]

snip

So I pose the very controversial question: is the US government too big or too weak?

The not an either-or; it’s a both-and. The U.S. government is an overgrown, bumbling blutocracy that is incapable of doing what needs to be done.

 

[ProdglArchitect]

The not an either-or; it’s a both-and. The U.S. government is an overgrown, bumbling blutocracy that is incapable of doing what needs to be done.

This reflects my views to a T. We need to trim the fat off of our government, and rip out a bunch of the bureaucracy that characterizes it.

 

[BartholomewB]

The not an either-or; it’s a both-and. The U.S. government is an overgrown, bumbling blutocracy that is incapable of doing what needs to be done.

Exactly so. Too big and too weak. It could go back to being smaller and stronger, like the earlier administrations that Fukuyama is talking about. But is that going to happen? I wouldn’t bet on it.

 

[ChaosGamma]

The not an either-or; it’s a both-and. The U.S. government is an overgrown, bumbling blutocracy that is incapable of doing what needs to be done.

This pretty much sums up my view.

 

[MaryT777]

The not an either-or; it’s a both-and. The U.S. government is an overgrown, bumbling blutocracy that is incapable of doing what needs to be done.

 

[DeniseNY]

This pretty much sums up my view.

I concur

 

[exnihilo]

I agree with others. The US government is too big in that it consumes far too much of our nation’s wealth. It is weak in that it fails to do a good job of providing the services that are supposedly only capable of being provided for by the state. Is is basically a giant wealth destroying machine. But the government is very powerful in terms of the rights and privileges it has. I wouldn’t call a government that spies on all electronic communication and has a kill list weak.

 

[SWolf]

The not an either-or; it’s a both-and. The U.S. government is an overgrown, bumbling blutocracy that is incapable of doing what needs to be done.

Yup. They can’t even control their own borders, one of the primary tasks of a government, and yet they want to get their hands on things they have no business being in.

 

[SWolf]

washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/januaryfebruary_2015/on_political_books/the_rise_and_fall_of_the_us_go053474.php?page=all

In America, respect for the rule of law was present at the nation’s creation. The country also democratized early, opening the vote to all white males in the 1820s, decades before any country in Europe. But it was relatively slow to create autonomous, impartial state bureaucracies thanks to a national temperament that militated against central governmental authority.

Maybe because they are unconstitutional? Once un-elected bureaucrats can write laws, it’s no longer a democracy.

 

[Vouthon]

I agree with others. The US government is too big in that it consumes far too much of our nation’s wealth.

I both agree and disagree.

In terms of the size and scope of executive authority, the US government is actually on the ultra-slim side relative to other Western democracies. Government expenditure as a percentage of GDP and total tax revenue as a percentage of GDP are vastly smaller in the US than in most other OECD countries. So in this respect, I profoundly disagree.

Where I do agree with you, however, is that there is a deeper underlying problem and that simply increasing the size of the US government as it is - which has been rapid over the last fifty years to try and address its shortcomings - will not make the US executive stronger as it did in European states.

This is because the size issue cannot be dealt with until the quality of government is improved. The decay in the quality of American government stems from uniquely American constitutional problem not replicated in Europe: the preference for power being vested in the institutions that limit executive power, namely the courts and political parties in the legislature, arising from age-old American tradition of mistrust of government power.

By prioritizing institutions that limit the government - in the form of the judiciary and legislature - the US has inadvertently become the very thing it feared. As one political commentator notes:

the-american-interest.com/2013/12/08/the-decay-of-american-political-institutions/

The courts, instead of being constraints on government, have become alternative instruments for the expansion of government. Ironically, out of a fear of empowering “big government”, the United States has ended up with a government that is very large, but that is actually less accountable because it is largely in the hands of unelected courts…

ndeed, both phenomena—the judicialization of administration and the spread of interest-group influence—tend to undermine trust in government, which tends to perpetuate and feed on itself. Distrust of executive agencies leads demands for more legal checks on administration, which further reduces the quality and effectiveness of government by reducing bureaucratic autonomy. It may seem paradoxical, but reduced bureaucratic autonomy is what in turn leads to rigid, rule-bound, un-innovative and incoherent government. Ordinary people may blame bureaucrats for these problems (as if bureaucrats enjoy working under a host of detailed rules, court orders, earmarks and complex, underfunded mandates coming from courts and legislators over which they have no control). But they are mistaken to do so; the problem with American government is less an unaccountable bureaucracy than an overall system that allocates what should properly be administrative powers to courts and political parties.

In short, the problems of American government flow from a structural imbalance between the strength and competence of the state, on the one hand, and the institutions that were originally designed to constrain the state, on the other. There is too much law and too much “democracy”, in the form of legislative intervention, relative to American state capacity. Some history can make this assertion clearer.

.

This essentially means that important governmental measures which would be performed by an executive bureaucracy in Europe are instead performed by judges in the US.

IMHO these powers should be transferred to the executive branch, as in most constitutional democracies. This would improve the quality of governance but I am quite sure that the US will never do it because you guys fear executive authority so much.

 

[SWolf]

I both agree and disagree.

In terms of the size and scope of executive authority, the US government is actually on the ultra-slim side relative to other Western democracies. Government expenditure as a percentage of GDP and total tax revenue as a percentage of GDP are vastly smaller in the US than in most other OECD countries. So in this respect, I profoundly disagree.

So? About every country is taking too much.

Where I do agree with you, however, is that there is a deeper underlying problem and that simply increasing the size of the US government as it is - which has been rapid over the last fifty years to try and address its shortcomings - will not make the US executive stronger as it did in European states.

Saying legislators are not capable of making laws and regulations, and instead need to be relegated to a bureaucrat, is an argument against democratic legislatures.

This essentially means that important governmental measures which would be performed by an executive bureaucracy in Europe are instead performed by judges in the US.

Both making laws out of thin air, and both of which are contrary to democracy.

IMHO these powers should be transferred to the executive branch, as in most constitutional democracies. This would improve the quality of governance but I am quite sure that the US will never do it because you guys fear executive authority so much.

The more powers that are delegated to the un-elected, the less of a democracy it is.

Mind you, I think Democracy is an awful system, but I’m thinking you think differently and this really shows a sympathy towards an authoritarian statism.

Read Hayek’s Road to Serfdom. He shows well were this path leads, and you are proving it to a T

 

[exnihilo]

In terms of the size and scope of executive authority, the US government is actually on the ultra-slim side relative to other Western democracies. Government expenditure as a percentage of GDP and total tax revenue as a percentage of GDP are vastly smaller in the US than in most other OECD countries. So in this respect, I profoundly disagree.

The executive branch has enormous power. Actually I think the US executive has much broader power than other Western democracies.

As for tax revenue this may well be true. But all of Christendom is suffering under the modern democratic nation state. Historically speaking these modern governments tax at an exorbitantly high rate. The taxes they revolted over in antiquity are about equivalent to the smallest of tax increases we suffer under today.

This is because the size issue cannot be dealt with until the quality of government is improved. The decay in the quality of American government stems from uniquely American constitutional problem not replicated in Europe: the preference for power being vested in the institutions that limit executive power, namely the courts and political parties in the legislature, arising from age-old American tradition of mistrust of government power.

Quality and government are not compatible. If you want quality than private capitalist solutions are the answer. With free markets you get more, cheaper, and better goods over time. With government you get less, more expensive and lower quality goods over time.

Again, I really don’t see how the US executive is limited. What can’t they do?

 

[Wyrd]

Goodness comes from individuals.

 

[Gregory_Olson]

In my youth and naivete I would argue the government is doing as good a job as we could expect of it. The foundation of the state has always been the family; I think this goes back to Aristotle and before. It’s pretty self-evident anyway; in a generation the whole government and civilization in their entirety will be the kids being raised today.
If the family is healthy, so is the civilization. And the less healthy families are–parents abandoning families, divorce, parents setting poor moral examples, neglect, etc., the more the government will have to step in and artificially support them, with welfare, more laws and more enforcement of those laws, etc. And it always does this inefficiently, it’d be unreasonable to expect otherwise. (I think economically this has something to do with the government inherently being a monopoly. It also might have something to do with the fact that a political leader, no matter how great, cannot care as well for a million children as two parents can care for a few children. Perhaps one of many reasons why one is a sacrament and not the other.)

If the government is struggling I’d say it would only be par for course, because the thing it’s standing on is clearly struggling–see pewsocialtrends.org/2010/11/18/the-decline-of-marriage-and-rise-of-new-families/2/#ii-overview. It’s trying, anyway, and I think it’s doing an overall OK job considering it’s increasingly getting out of its depth. If there is decomposing going on today, I would argue it’s in the government’s foundations rather than the government itself.

(This is the best secular argument against gay marriage by the way, although now it’s a bit late. The US government has neither interest nor money to spare in supporting homosexual unions–simply, and I know it’s harsh, because they can’t have children.)

 

[SWolf]

In my youth and naivete I would argue the government is doing as good a job as we could expect of it. The foundation of the state has always been the family; I think this goes back to Aristotle and before. It’s pretty self-evident anyway; in a generation the whole government and civilization in their entirety will be the kids being raised today.
If the family is healthy, so is the civilization. And the less healthy families are–parents abandoning families, divorce, parents setting poor moral examples, neglect, etc., the more the government will have to step in and artificially support them, with welfare, more laws and more enforcement of those laws, etc. And it always does this inefficiently, it’d be unreasonable to expect otherwise. (I think economically this has something to do with the government inherently being a monopoly. It also might have something to do with the fact that a political leader, no matter how great, cannot care as well for a million children as two parents can care for a few children. Perhaps one of many reasons why one is a sacrament and not the other.)

One could make a strong argument it’s government policies that are responsible for causing these trends.

aei.org/publication/the-great-society-at-50/

 

[SuperLuigi]

Big, bloated, and inefficient to the nth degree.

Then again, so is the EU.

Reforms needed? :yup:

 

[Robert_Sock]

I’m neither patriotic or nationalistic, but I think that the US government is doing a great job! Open your eyes and see how the government keeps everything in check. People like to point fingers and rip our government to shreds. Do not listen to them. We are one nation under God, and that fact speaks loud and clear. We should honor politicians, for their work we are making leaps and bounds in our culture.

Please stop finger-pointing, as if government leaders are responsible for all the ills of our society.

If you cannot trust politicians, it may help to know that they are both servants of God. God is in charge, and we should take all our complaints to Him alone.

 

[SuperLuigi]

=Robert Sock;13363560]I’m neither patriotic or nationalistic, but I think that the US government is doing a great job! Open your eyes and see how the government keeps everything in check. People like to point fingers and rip our government to shreds. Do not listen to them. We are one nation under God, and that fact speaks loud and clear. We should honor politicians, for their work we are making leaps and bounds in our culture.

I’m sure a lot of politicians would like to be honored by us lower minions, but it isn’t happening here.

If these leaders are so smart and want everyone to think they are smart, they sure don’t act like it most of the time.

Of course, we keep voting them in, so what does that say about us?

If you cannot trust politicians, it may help to know that they are both servants of God. God is in charge, and we should take all our complaints to Him alone.

Oh, they are servants alright, but of God? :ehh:

Do you call going to war and funding abortion and persecuting Christians as well as scandal and corruption serving God?

We need to pray for our leaders, but let’s not deny the situation out for some sort of emotional gain…