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FROM THE ARCHIVES: May 2008 -- Late last February, Michelle Obama spoke to a group of voters in Zanesville, Ohio, which is a relatively poor city whose median household income is less than $40,000 a year and 20 percent of whose adults lack even a high school education. In her conversation with the audience, Obama (Princeton ’85; Harvard Law ’88) warned them, somewhat superfluously it would seem, about the sin of avarice and the camel’s difficulty in passing through the needle’s eye.
Speaking of her husband and herself, she said: “We left corporate America, which is a lot of what we’re asking young people to do. . . . Don’t go into corporate America. You know, become teachers. Work for the community. Be social
workers. Be a nurse. Those are the careers that we need, and we’re encouraging our young people to do that. But if you make that choice, as we did, to move out of the money-making industry into the helping industry, then your salaries respond.”
The good people of Zanesville might be pardoned for believing that they would actually benefit a great deal from participating in the money-making industry. And they might, even more, be pardoned for wondering exactly when it was that Michelle Obama herself moved out of the money-making industry. To be sure, she works for the University of Chicago Hospitals, but not as a nurse. She is vice president for community and external affairs, and, according to Byron York of National Review, her compensation “jumped from $121,910 in 2004, just before her husband was elected to the Senate, to $316,962 in 2005, just after he took office.”
Of course, the fact that people with political connections are treated well by others is not new to this world, and it is not new even to the world of Michelle Obama. Although she describes herself as being from a “working class” family, she actually seems to have been solidly middle class—owing to political patronage. Her father, Fraser Robinson, was a Democratic Party precinct captain in Chicago and held a city job at a water purification plant. According to Britain’s Daily Mail newspaper (and why is it that only British newspapers look into such things?), “even before overtime, he earned $42,686,” which today would be about $150,000.
Now, my purpose in recounting this history is not to cry “Scandal!” Quite the reverse. My purpose, rather, is to remind readers of the Tory truth that public service is a perfectly natural and moral way to rise in the world—always has been, always will be. Yes, serving the public interest is the task of public servants, just as serving the patient’s interest is the
task of a nurse and serving the child’s interest is the task of a teacher. But the service provided by these “helping professions” is not and ought not to be altruistic service, service that sacrifice’s the nurse’s self-interest or the teacher’s self-interest, contrary to what Michelle Obama seems to think. Properly undertaken, these “helping professions” are merely the professionals’ chosen means of succeeding in the world, as surely as investment banking and corporate lawyering are roads to success for the people who choose them.
And so, too, is public service a way of succeeding in the world, partly by salary and applause and civil honors but partly also by those incidentals—a nice job for one’s wife, for example—that come with being someone in the world. The question is not, as “good government” types would have us believe, how can we turn public servants into Ralph Nader-like ascetics who will shun as taint and corruption every perquisite and favor offered them. The question is how we can make such alleged “corruption” work for freedom rather than against it.
In April 1791, when President George Washington was out of town on a Southern tour, Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson invited his fellow Cabinet members to supper, along with Vice President John Adams. When the cloth had been drawn, as Jefferson later told the story, the conversation turned to the British constitution, and John Adams opined that if the British system could be purged of corruption “it would be the most perfect constitution ever devised by the wit of man.” By “corruption,” Adams meant those perquisites that Britain’s government could hand out in order to assemble winning coalitions. Alexander Hamilton responded drily: Purge it of corruption and it would not work. Thomas Jefferson was scandalized. But I suspect that Hamilton was correct. Men who can lead other men perform a valuable social function, and it is natural that they are cultivated with gifts, favors, and benefits.
These Hamiltonian truths came to mind recently when I read an insightful essay that the Hungarian-born economist Anthony de Jasay wrote for the Web site “Cato Unbound.” The burden of his article was that even the most cleverly designed, pro-freedom constitution cannot guarantee our safety from government incursions against liberty. And I wondered if the ultimate explanation of de Jasay’s dismal conclusion was not to be found in Hamilton’s remark about the British constitution: Only “corruption” can make it work.
In his essay, de Jasay says: “At least since Locke, [classical liberals have described] a normative ideal of government: the protector of ‘rights’ its citizens are in some fashion endowed with, and the guarantor of liberty that ranks above rival values. Such government uses coercion only to enforce the rules of just conduct. . . . [Unfortunately, this ideal] makes it seems that the writing of a constitution of liberty is a plausible means for transforming the normative ideal into positive reality.”
De Jasay then goes on to argue that constitutions are inherently unable to restrain government. The problem, as he sees it, begins with the fact that every country has a dividing line between those matters that are under the control of individuals and those matters that are under the control of the collective, which today means “under the control of government.” But where that line is drawn at any given time is up to government, and that gives the state the means of enlarging its power, by absorbing more and more of the private sector. We may try to limit the government’s ability to encroach on the private sphere by writing various rules into the constitution, but who will force the government to abide by those rules? As de Jasay puts it, “How does the king enforce the rule of submission against himself?” Clearly, he cannot. Thus, every government will always be able to violate rights, despite any constitution, because there exists no force capable of stopping it.
But will the government violate rights? De Jasay argues that the public officials who constitute government have strong motives to do so.
Today, of course, we do not have kings but parties, interest groups, and personal coteries, all of whom wish to exercise power in varying degrees. And in order to get their hands on that power, these groups seek the support of different leaders capable of delivering different constituencies. What this means, in de Jasay’s view, is that political rivals bid for support, promising more and more goodies to the leaders of constituencies until one of the rivals is able to form a winning coalition.
It was, as I recall, Congressman Tony Coelho (Democrat of California) who finally made this logic brutally clear to Americans. Traditionally, political support had been bestowed along vaguely ideological lines: Labor and its allies and lobbyists supported the Democrats; business and its allies and lobbyists supported the Republicans. As a result, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) raised barely a million dollars for the 1980 election, and of course Republicans won both the White House and the Senate. Coelho, though he had been in the House only two years, took control of the DCCC in 1981 and determined to smash the ideological foundations of political support. As the New York Times reported (May 29, 1989), “he went after political action committee money with a vengeance, hammering home to Republican-leaning PAC’s that the Democrats controlled the House. ‘He just said to them, “We control this place,”’ said [GOP consultant Eddie]. Mahe. “He just scared the hell out of them.” The campaign committee’s coffers swelled. It raised $1.2 million in the 1980 election cycle, and $15 million in 1986.” And the Democrats took back the Senate.
Notice, though, that the “goodies” Coelho used to amass support was nothing more than promising he would not withhold from supportive constituencies that which they might reasonably expect was theirs as a matter of right. And notice that this is often the case. The gun lobby and the home-schooling lobby, for example, provide tremendous support for politicians who merely promise not to deny those groups that which they should have without asking: the freedom to own guns, the freedom to educate their children.
Thus, we may accept de Jasay’s logic and yet argue that the pursuit of political power does not of itself require government intrusion into the free market or the personal sphere—merely the reminder that politicians have the power of intruding. The “goodies” that people seek in exchange for backing politicians might be nothing more than that which they should have by right: laissez-faire, being left alone. After all, businesses shaken down by the Mafia often ask nothing more than that.
And de Jasay himself notes that this dynamic may explain the relatively low levels of taxation in the United States, as compared to the levels in those European countries where politicians enjoy government-funded campaigns. In the United States, one major “goody” that politicians promise wealthy donors is simply letting them keep a bit more of their own money.
The problem that de Jasay points out, though couched in the rhetoric of Public Choice, is as ancient as political philosophy, for it is, one might say, the problem of Plato’s Republic: How can public servants be induced to serve the public and not themselves? Unfortunately, when the problem is framed in those terms, there is simply no answer. Public servants will serve themselves. And anyone who accepts a morality that is in the Aristotelian tradition, rather than the Platonic tradition, must go further: Public servants ought to serve themselves, whether one calls their goal self-interest, or happiness, or flourishing. The whole attempt of “good government” advocates to “clean up” politics by ridding it of self-serving behavior is a Platonist endeavor that needs to be dismissed.
[T]he freedoms that our Founding Fathers thought worth a revolution were passively surrendered to a predatory government.That is what brought to my mind Alexander Hamilton and his remark in praise of “corruption,” which so shocked Thomas Jefferson. As noted above, public service is one of the classic means of rising in the world, and that is not going to change. The “corruption” that Hamilton endorsed was simply the honors, offices, and sinecures that the prime minister of England had at his disposable to reward his followers. To Hamilton’s way of thinking, and to mine, such benefits allow a country to draw talented people into government and to accomplish high-minded ideals. Without such inducements, public officials will find other sources of enrichment, most likely the wealth of citizens.
We might make an analogy here. If military geniuses could gain status and power only by hiring mercenaries with the booty they obtained from raiding cities, then someone like de Jasay might well come along and argue that no controls on such depredations could possibly work—and he would be right. So long as depredation was the only way up, warlords would make use of it, and who could compel them do otherwise? The answer to ending such free-booting, obviously, has been to provide would-be military leaders with an alternative means of obtaining the stature and power they seek.
Similarly, I suggest, the problem for advocates of limited government is to answer the question: What can we offer good and talented men that will bring them into public service and allow them to obtain the high status and great wealth they seek? How can we “corrupt” public officials on behalf of freedom?
Admittedly, the sort of “corruption” I propose is merely a political-science response to de Jasay’s political science conundrum, and that is why I raise only two cheers on its behalf. My answer assumes—what is more than political science—that the nation’s citizenry believes it ought to be free from the depredations of public officials and is willing to “corrupt” them in pursuit of that goal.
But what if the people lack such a belief? The answer is written in American history.
The Constitution of the United States was one of mankind’s most miraculous documents, and, by my reckoning, its intricate contrivances helped preserve liberty in this country for 150 years: from the Convention of 1787 to the Supreme Court revolution of 1937. Since that latter date, however, government has been able to do virtually anything it wants, and citizens have rarely been able to invoke the Constitution in defense of their rights. For that, we may blame Franklin Roosevelt, who threatened to destroy the Supreme Court if it did not allow him to run roughshod over the Constitution, or we may blame those Supreme Court justices who gave in after Roosevelt’s threat. But the sad fact is that by 1937 there simply were not enough Americans who believed that they were morally entitled to be free.
Only a philosopher can save us now.
Just why that was so can be explained by 150 years of cultural change. In the early nineteenth century, the natural-rights philosophy of Locke and Jefferson proved unable to hold its own against nineteenth-century utilitarianism, which called the idea of rights “nonsense on stilts.” More important still, the philosophy of natural justice proved unable to hold its own against Hegelian Idealism, which saw all laws as merely expressions of the age. Thus, the Hegel-influenced New Historical School came to dominate the German universities, and the many Americans who traveled to Germany seeking doctorates in the late nineteenth century brought back to the United States the virus of historical relativism. In 1905, Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes dismissed freedoms formerly thought to be manifestations of natural justice as the mere preferences of Herbert Spencer and his followers. A generation later, a majority of Americans agreed with him. The notion of liberty as natural justice was dead, and the freedoms that our Founding Fathers thought worth a revolution were passively surrendered to a predatory government.
How can a belief in the moral imperative of liberty now be restored? Anthony de Jasay certainly cannot tell us, for he holds that moral beliefs are neither true nor false, that they are only “superstitions and taboos.” Such social-science positivists—be they economists, sociologists, or political scientists—may demonstrate that this or that particular violation of liberty is “counter-productive” to the violator’s own intent or to the intent of the constituencies seeking it. But social scientists cannot restore to America its cultural belief in human liberty based on individual rights.
Only a philosopher can save us now.
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