Defeating Leviathan

I do not like to put a label on my political beliefs, but one of the main elements is a belief in smaller government generally. This doesn’t come from a very deep understanding of libertarian philosophy, but from my economics training and general understanding and experience of the world as it is. In particular the experience of the government response to coronavirus has massively sharpened my understanding of the misery governments can cause and the mistakes they can make when taking too much power over the lives of their citizens. 

Recent discussion with the esteemed Doc Hammer himself replying to ‘cdh’, on the subject of possible tensions between a more libertarian outlook and an opposition to ‘globalist’ motives leads me to ponder about what makes a small government society possible/desirable. The possibility and the desirability are not the same, but they are linked. 

Specifically what are the incentives to use coercion to impose laws, regulations and taxes on your fellow citizens? If we understand this then we can understand where these incentives do not exist, and where a small state can exist. To be clear this is not argument for the desirability or otherwise of a small government, merely for the conditions under which it could exist. 

The first main driver of demand for government power is income and wealth inequality. This is the classic driver of traditionally class-based left-wing demands for greater government spending, to both directly reduce inequality using taxes, and then further reduce it via spending on social security, education, health systems etc. This demand could in theory be provided without coercion by voluntary charity, and this was indeed the norm prior to the 20th century. Without elaborating on the entire history of class-conflict and growth in the size of government in the last century, I think it is fair to say that the more equal a society is (before government redistribution) the less the demand for redistribution, and the better a chance for a small state. 

The second driver of demand I can identify is diversity of thought and behaviour. Much of the history of tyranny and despotism by the state is a story of the suppression and abuse of those who do not share the ideals of their rulers. Consider current issues in Iran that have been sparked by laws requiring specific headware for women. These laws, and the apparatus needed to enforce them are only necessary because some in the community would not do so if not coerced to do so, and others believe they should coerce their fellow citizens because society-wide moral standards are important. In a totally different manner, current changes in Twitter are contentious for similar reasons. Some of the users believe that an apparatus of moderation, ‘fact-checking’ and banning, with all the attendant cost is needed to suppress the dissemination of views they do not like. But this is only needed because of diversity in views, if Twitter was simply a closed site for people who all shared the same ideas then none of that apparatus of control would be needed. 

A third element of demand for state intervention relates to trust in the private sector (and this relates back to both of the first two). If you believe that corporations and other private citizens will broadly behave in moral ways you can relate to, then the demand for onerous regulations and laws to control and punish their behaviour are not so needed. If you trust that local companies won’t dump toxic waste in your river you don’t need a set of laws, and inspectors and fines to deal with it.  

So a homogeneous society in terms of ideas, behaviour, income and wealth, with high levels of trust, is the one with the fewest drivers for government coercion in taxes, laws and regulations, and therefore the one where a small state is most likely. 

Going back to the immigration element of cdh and Doc Hammer’s discussion a resulting argument might be that a successful small-state society may need a relatively stringent immigration policy to maintain the structure of society that keeps it successful. This is a contradiction with no easy answer if true. 

To reiterate these are arguments for what the necessary conditions for a small state are, this is different to what makes a small state actually happen in reality. Actual small states seem to occur in places where society has broken down to an extent where effective government is impossible (for example Somalia), and thus give libertarians a bad name! 

The best example of a ‘small-state’ is simply the standard family unit. No coercion is required (at least normally) because family members want to help eachother out. Rules and regulations need only be minimal because members of a successful family unit share similar values and trust eachother implicitly. Can this scale up to a society of millions in the modern world? Maybe not, and even if it could a genuinely small state feels a distant prospect in somewhere like the UK because whilst libertarians are unwilling to use the power of state to enforce their ideas and objectives, whilst the other side will.