Of Government in General, and of the Machine We Have Built

Some writers have so confounded society with government as to leave little or no distinction between them, whereas they are not only different but have different origins. Society is produced by our wants, and government by our wickedness. Society encourages our happiness by uniting our affections; government, by restraining our vices. The first is a patron, the last a punisher.

That is Paine, and he is right, and I want to build on it rather than repeat it.

Here is the thing he could not have said in 1776, because the vocabulary did not exist: a government is a machine, and machines produce what they are built to produce, regardless of the intentions of the people operating them.

Consider a factory built to make chairs. You may staff it entirely with people who prefer tables. You may elect a new foreman every two years on a platform of tables. The factory will go on making chairs, because that is what the machinery does, and the honest, table-loving workers will find themselves at the end of each day standing beside a pile of chairs, blaming each other.

This is the condition of American government, and it explains something that otherwise makes no sense.

The thing that makes no sense

Ask an American what they think of Congress and you will hear contempt. Ask them what should be done and you will hear, usually, something quite reasonable. Ask them whether the people in Congress are bad people and most will say yes, they are, and if we could only replace them with better ones the country would improve.

We have tested that theory repeatedly. We throw out the bums about once a decade. In 1994 we threw them out. In 2006 we threw them out. In 2010, 2018, 2022 we threw them out. The new ones arrive, full of intention, and within a term or two they behave like the old ones.

The conclusion most people draw is that power corrupts, or that Washington is a swamp. These are satisfying explanations and they are so incomplete as to be useless. Ordinary people, placed in a system that punishes cooperation and rewards conflict, will produce conflict. Not because they are wicked. Because they are ordinary, and because they would like to keep their jobs.

If you want different behavior, you must change what the machine rewards. That is the whole argument of this pamphlet. Everything else is detail.

On the difference between a problem and a symptom

Most political writing addresses symptoms, and I want to say plainly why I am not going to.

Health care in this country is expensive and confusing. Housing costs more than young people can pay. Schools in poor places are worse than schools in rich places. The climate is changing. Machines are learning to do work that people used to do, faster than anyone expected. These are all real, and several of them are more urgent than anything I am going to propose.

But look at what happens when we try to address them. A bill is written. It is loaded with unrelated provisions, held hostage to a budget fight, buried by a leader who never schedules it, passed in a form so weakened that it does nothing, or passed intact and reversed by the next administration because it never had support broad enough to survive one.

We are not failing to solve these problems because they are hard, though they are hard. We are failing because the instrument we would have to use is broken. You cannot perform surgery with a bent instrument no matter how well you understand anatomy.

So: fix the instrument first. I am aware of how that sounds. It sounds like a man who has been asked to put out a fire and has begun by organizing the tool shed. I ask only that you read the rest before deciding.

What government is for, stated plainly

Strip away every argument of the last century and there are perhaps four things we need government to do that we cannot do for ourselves.

Keep us safe: from invasion, from violence, from fraud, from the small number of people who will hurt others if nobody stops them.

Enforce the rules fairly: so that a contract means something, so that the powerful cannot simply take from the weak, so that the referee is not on the payroll of one team.

Do the few things markets genuinely cannot: insure against catastrophes too large for individuals to bear, build the things everyone uses and nobody can own, pay for the discoveries that no company can capture the value of.

Keep a floor under people: so that bad luck, bad health, or a bad decade does not end in destitution, because a country where that happens is neither decent nor stable.

That list is common sense in the oldest meaning of the phrase: sense held in common, judgment that does not require expertise, only honesty. Nearly every American accepts it. The fights are about the size of each item and who pays, and those are real fights I am not pretending away.

But notice: a government that cannot pass a budget, cannot prevent its own members from trading stocks in the industries they regulate, and cannot close a deal that three-quarters of the country supports is failing at something prior to all four. It is failing at the precondition. It is not doing badly at the argument; it has lost the ability to conclude one.

The one thing the Founders got wrong

I want to say something that risks sounding disrespectful and is not meant to be.

The men who designed this system were extraordinary, and the design has lasted longer than any comparable one. They anticipated tyranny, and built against it beautifully. They anticipated the mob, and built against that too. They understood that men are not angels and constructed a machine that assumed they would not be.

They got one thing badly wrong, and they knew it almost immediately.

They did not plan for political parties. They thought factions would form and dissolve around particular questions, never hardening. Washington devoted much of his farewell address to warning against exactly what happened: the “spirit of party,” which he said “agitates the community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms, kindles the animosity of one part against another, foments occasionally riot and insurrection.”²

He wrote that in 1796. Within four years the thing he warned about had taken permanent hold, and it has never let go.

Everything I am going to propose in this pamphlet is, at bottom, an attempt to finish the work those men left unfinished: to build against permanent faction the way they built against tyranny. They would recognize the project. They might even think it overdue.