{"id":20492,"date":"2013-05-31T08:56:39","date_gmt":"2013-05-31T13:56:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=20492"},"modified":"2013-05-31T08:56:39","modified_gmt":"2013-05-31T13:56:39","slug":"the-congenital-defect-of-politics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2013\/05\/31\/the-congenital-defect-of-politics\/","title":{"rendered":"The congenital defect of politics"},"content":{"rendered":"

Jonah Goldberg<\/a> talks about a new book from Kevin Williamson:<\/p>\n

Kevin Williamson\u2019s new book is quite possibly the best indictment of the State since Our Enemy, the State<\/em> appeared some eight decades ago. It is a lovely, brilliant, humane, and remarkably entertaining work.<\/p>\n

Though he sometimes sounds like a reasonable anarchist, Williamson is not in fact opposed to all government. But he is everywhere opposed to anything that smacks of the State. There\u2019s an old line about how to carve an elephant: Take a block of marble and then remove everything that isn\u2019t an elephant. Williamson looks at everything we call the State or the government and wants to remove everything that shouldn\u2019t be there, which is quite a lot. In what may be my favorite part of the book, he demolishes, with Godzilla-versus-Bambi ease, the notion that only government can provide public goods. In fact, most of what government provides are nonpublic goods (transfer payments, subsidies, etc.), and a great deal of what the market provides \u2014 from Google and Wikipedia to Starbucks rest\u00adrooms \u2014 are indisputably public goods.<\/p>\n

[. . .]<\/p>\n

Williamson\u2019s core argument is that politics has a congenital defect: Politics cannot get \u201cless wrong\u201d (a term coined by artificial-intelligence guru Eliezer Yudkowsky). Productive systems \u2014 the scientific method, the market, evolution \u2014 all have the built-in ability to learn from failures. Nothing (in this life at least) ever becomes immortally perfect, but some things become less wrong through trial and error. The market, writes Williamson, \u201cis a form of social evolution that is metaphorically parallel to bio\u00adlogical evolution. Consider the case of New Coke, or Betamax, or McDonald\u2019s Arch Deluxe, or Clairol\u2019s Touch of Yogurt Shampoo. . . . When hordes of people don\u2019t show up to buy the product, then the product dies.\u201d Just like organisms in the wild, corporations that don\u2019t learn from failures eventually fade away.<\/p>\n

Except in politics: \u201cThe problem of politics is that it does not know how to get less wrong.\u201d While new iPhones regularly burst forth like gifts from the gods, politics plods along. \u201cOther than Social Security, there are very few 1935 vintage products still in use,\u201d he writes. \u201cResistance to innovation is a part of the deep structure of politics. In that, it is like any other monopoly. It never goes out of business \u2014 despite flooding the market with defective and dangerous products, mistreating its customers, degrading the environment, cooking the books, and engaging in financial shenanigans that would have made Gordon Gekko pale to contemplate.\u201d Hence, it is not U.S. Steel, which was eventually washed away like an imposing sand castle in the surf, but only politics that can claim to be \u201cthe eternal corporation.\u201d<\/p>\n

The reason for this immortality is simple: The people running the State are never sufficiently willing to contemplate that they are the problem. If a program dedicated to putting the round pegs of humanity into square holes fails, the bureaucrats running it will conclude that the citizens need to be squared off long before it dawns on them that the State should stop treating people like pegs in the first place. Furthermore, in government, failure is an exciting excuse to ask for more funding or more power.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jonah Goldberg talks about a new book from Kevin Williamson: Kevin Williamson\u2019s new book is quite possibly the best indictment of the State since Our Enemy, the State appeared some eight decades ago. It is a lovely, brilliant, humane, and remarkably entertaining work. Though he sometimes sounds like a reasonable anarchist, Williamson is not in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[32,8,84,53],"tags":[756,469,322,661],"class_list":["post-20492","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-bureaucracy","category-government","category-politics","tag-anarchy","tag-monopolies","tag-nannystate","tag-regulation"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-5kw","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20492","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20492"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20492\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20493,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20492\/revisions\/20493"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20492"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20492"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20492"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}