º Politics and Power
º Public Goods and Governments
Instead of direct entry on Forum, I'll use web pages like this for weekly extended notes on what we did in class. It's easier than posting there since applications such as photographs and graphics are easily incorporated. I'll rely on the forum for discussions.
You have been born and raised under the protective umbrella of several American governments, so it's simple to assume that their existence is a natural thing. But it's not. They come about by human design rather than mysterious or unknown beginnings. Here we consider why we even have government at all. To explain government, first we have to understand the term politics. This term is not defined in text Ch. 1 nor anywhere else in the 21 chapters. The Glossary p. 619 has eight terms with "political" in their prefix, but no definition of politics. They left that job to me.
Politics and Power Top; Next Down
I define politics via two important elements: 1) the exercise of power, and 2) making collective rather than individual decisions. Power between two entities A and B means this: if A gets B to do something B would otherwise not do, then A exercises power over B. We recognize a slight wrinkle on this via the term deterrence: A gets B not to do something B would otherwise do. Suppose Bart were able to somehow convince Nelson that it wasn't worth Nelson's trouble to bully Bart out of his daily lunch money. That ain't easy; but if Bart could do that, he's practicing deterrence. Humans routinely try this, and so do other animal species. Some may remember Gary Larson's Far Side cartoon picturing two lions watching antelopes parade by. One has "Turbo" written brightly on his flanks and is looking over at the catty pair. One lion to the other: "Don't even bother!"
But if you truly want something badly enough, you as A will bother B. Those of you who are parents will probably have instant recognition of a certain four-part hierarchy of exercises of power. These are 1) persuasion, 2) use of authority, 3) inducements or bribery, and 4) use of direct coercion or force. These form an ascending sequence of uses by A.
Assume you're A, and you have a 5-year old child B. If you want her to do something, you may first try a brilliantly crafted argument to convince her that it's best (that this B should do what she otherwise will not do). So when your five-year old steps on a tack in her room, you wait till the tears are barely dry before saying "If you had picked up the tacks from the floor, you would not step on one and hurt yourself." Brilliant argument, and it should persuade any age fiver who knows English as her mother tongue.
But if a day or two passes and that does not work, then you might try an appeal to authority: "I speak as your mother. Mothers all know that kids should always pick up tacks from the floor." or maybe "Your grandmother told me you should pick up the tacks as soon as you're finished with them." Here it's not a brilliant persuasive case, but a simple appeal to someone the child presumably holds in esteem.
But alas! Another day passes without a picked-up floor. So then it may (often) come down to bartering over a fee for this child's service. You might try this with cookies near at hand in a clear container: "I see that your room still needs to be picked up." If she is looking at the cookies while you say this, you can guess what's next. "I ... want five cookies!" And you say: "Pick your tacks up and we'll discuss it." "No, I want the cookies first!" "OK, one cookie now, and if you pick up the tacks, another one when you're done." The variations here are endless, but all to the same end. A got B to do what B would otherwise not do.
But that's not the end of this story. Suppose 1) it's a far more important issue than her room, and 2) you're dead serious about getting this job done. If it's picking up a room, I daresay most parents would throw up hands and do the pickup themselves if bribery were to fail. But not if it's wearing a seatbelt during rush hour in a speeding car. Unless your name is Britney and you lack a basic child-safety education, surely you'd get dead serious about a child who won't wear a seatbelt. Would you resort to directly making the child wear the belt if all else fails? I damned sure would! Bet you agree if you're a parent (and Britney, you don't vote on this).
So politics is about getting your way through use of power, and that can be done in one or several ways. The combinations of persuasion, authority, bribery, and force are endless; but all are to get B to do A's bidding.
Public Goods and Governments Top
In America we celebrate the free enterprise system so thoroughly that some among us doubt the need for any but minimal governance. We call these folks libertarians, and they insist that personal freedom comes only in this way. They have a point. Consider the text's standard Max Weber definition of government as that institution that has a "monopoly on the legitimate use of force" (Ch. 1, p. 6; and Glossary). OK, then why allow such an institution to exist at all? I don't personally like being forced to do things, and probably you don't either.
You might say "wait a minute, this government is a democracy, with popular elections for major positions of power, competition for office, basic rights established in the Constitution, rule of law rather than of men, and so forth." Sure, sure; but Weber's definition extends to these via the term "legitimate." If you are ruled rather than governed, then legitimacy is irrelevant. Stipulation of rights via the Bill of Rights and elsewhere are designed to prevent arbitrary use of force by rulers. Fairly conducted elections in democracy confer legitimacy--a right to use the powers of the elected offices. That includes use of force via police, military, binding judgments of courts of law, and taxation. Democratic governments have these monopolies and use them regularly.
So what justifies a government doing so? We get a lot of that in Ch. 2, but I have a separate view to put on it. See Glossary p. 619 for the term public goods. These are "goods enjoyed simultaneously by a group, as opposed to a private good that must be divided up to be shared." OK, public goods are indivisible for the group, like the air in the theater as opposed to your own popcorn. Public goods like that are also nonexclusive: you cannot keep anyone in that theater from breathing the air (barring a criminal assault). In the economists' discussions of consumption, we say public goods are jointly consumed. This all means that private payments for goods in private markets can break down, for how do you get everyone to pay for the public goods? With divisible popcorn, that's easy: no pay, no pop. But the air is "free" in our common parlance, even though heated or warmed air is actually expensive to produce. Look now to Glossary p. 616 on "the free-rider problem." Free riders are those who consume a public good without contributing toward its production; and Glossary adds "people can enjoy the benefits of group activity without bearing any of the costs."
Hmmm. What do we do about free riders who breathe the air for free? Nothing. But there are other public goods that are very expensive and are crucial to our advanced quality of life. You can traverse this large state via freeways (I55, I-270, and I70--God help you for that one). In Cape Girardeau, you sit down in Jeremiah's or Buckner's behind a nice mile-long floodwall. You walk and ride on city streets. You can toss frisbees in spacious County Park or hold picnics there. You cross to Illinois on a $100 million dollar Bill Emerson Bridge (with 80% of that bill paid by the fed's). You have publicly provided water that's been through our city filtration system next door to the Big Muddy. You can see a $60 million dollar creek culvert next to Highway 61 to prevent another midtown flood like the 1986 May deluge of that highway's business district. You have fire and police and legal protections. You have paved county roads to remote locales, which get U.S. mail six days of every week. You get protection from al Q'aeda by the efforts of our Department of Homeland Security (you may not see that one, but it's presumably there). That's a small section of an impressive list that I use against libertarians who wish government would defend our shores, deliver some mail, and otherwise do little to nothing.
Why not let our vaunted private enterprise take care of all these things? Actually, we often do, by contracting out jobs. But it's done under governmental aegis that stipulates a service for every person. In the voluntary private sector, that's not how we play. Instead, it's no pay, no play (with private goods being excludable). If you want to play golf at a country club, pay the club membership dues or else be excluded. But government normally cannot do that, for a simple reason. It's taxation. Government compels us to pay for its upkeep and for whatever it produces. When I am obliged to pay, I am entitled to take a share. That's how Social Security and Medicare work for older folks who spent years in our work force (their "contributions" actually being payroll taxes).
In short, governments short-circuit the free rider problem by making everybody pay for things government produces. And it doesn't matter that government may farm out the actual construction to private firms. The goods are still public once they are in operation. That means voluntary willingness to pay for them will always confront the free rider who declines to contribute. Now in small groups, this is often a small-scale or solvable problem. A small church will customarily pay for its public goods with pass-the-plate contributions. If you let that plate pass you by without putting green paper in it, others will see, and soon everybody will know! Social pressure ensues: "You better get right with God before it's too late!" Voluntary farm-country associations to build collective earthen levees are everywhere south of Cape in the Missouri Bootheel flood zones. Small-scale public goods get contributions from nearly everybody with minimal use of government force.
But large-scale public goods are a different story. What if we experimented with a voluntary system of payments to finance Homeland Security protection against terrorists? God knows, we agree now on the need for that. But do each of you trust others in this class to also contribute? Personally, I have to be a bit skeptical. I don't mean cynical; I am not certain that others are up to no good. But I'm skeptical; like any good Missourian, you have to show me. If we all come to know each other and are closely linked like farm neighbors or church pew regulars, then probably everyone will choose to contribute. But what if there are 100,000 or 1 million of us and we never go face-to-face? Then I doubt that we'll avoid free riding.
Our conclusion is inevitable: governments exist to provide large-scale public goods. That includes the attributes of democracy itself: the rule of laws, the preservation of basic rights, the provision of power with limits to persons who will govern us rather than rule us. Think about it a minute. Do you know another way to get this job done? We're not going to go out of the government business anytime soon.
Russell Renka
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Copyright©2007, Russell D. Renka