RUTHFULLY YOURS

Quite a few in this country are madly in love with government. They cannot conceive of life in which we are free agents, liberated from the chains of reckless lawmaking, imperious regulating and stifling bureaucracy. It’s a distorted world view.

And it’s one held by a couple of university academics, who claim “the U.S. government is attempting to dismantle itself,” with the Trump administration setting out “to create an America its people have never experienced – one without a meaningful government.”

Sidney Shapiro, Wake Forest University, and Joseph P. Tomain, University of Cincinnati, who last year wrote the book “How Government Built America,” summarize their thoughts in The Conversation. They write like apologists for statism, a nasty ideology that relies on coercion and interventionism and is the factory setting for those who wish to rule rather than govern within constitutional limits. It’s founded on the belief that says “government knows better than you, in regards to important matters,” and is poisonous to civil society.

The pair complain that President Donald Trump’s “aim to eliminate government could result in” a country “in which free-market economic forces operate without any accountability to the public.” Do they have any idea how far off they are?

Free markets are in fact “ruthless regulators,” says James Rogers, a Texas A&M University political science professor. While there is a “widespread belief that markets facilitate self-interested, even selfish, behavior,” and “need to be regulated to limit the pernicious effects of human selfishness,” they are in reality “a superlative form of regulation. “

“To be sure, owners are pursuing their self-interest,” Rogers continues. But “in creating a competitive market, society exploits the self-interest of business owners to advance the public good. This insight isn’t new.”

Yet somehow Shapiro and Tomain missed it.

The pair, however, is acutely aware of the existence of the federal bureaucracy, and set about to defend it. They grouse that “until now, however, it has never been government policy to shut down government wholesale by defunding agencies such as the U.S. Agency for International Development or threatening to do so with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the Department of Education.”

This is nonsense. Just because “wholesale” defunding might not have happened before, it doesn’t mean that it shouldn’t happen. It’s absurd to suggest that once a department or agency has been established it can’t be dismantled. Those lazy, overfed cows in Washington are not sacred.

We don’t deny that the government has taken on and completed a number of large-scale public-works projects, such as the Hoover Dam, the Tennessee Valley Authority and a national network of highways and bridges. It has also, as the authors point out, helped fund some of the research that has produced modern conveniences.

But this should bring up two questions: One, were the projects and research expenditures the best uses of resources? Two, is it unassailably true that the government’s involvement in these projects has produced outcomes superior to those the private sector would have achieved?

Consider the Hoover Dam, considered by some “the greatest engineering work of its character attempted by the hand of man” is quite an impressive sight. Yet it might “ultimately be the biggest malinvestment in history.”

More generally, history shows that a “look at the two oldest infrastructure agencies — the Army Corps of Engineers and the Bureau of Reclamation,” which built the Hoover Dam, present clear evidence “that the federal government shouldn’t be in the infrastructure business,” says Cato Institute’s Chris Edwards.

Some are surely blind to it, but government projects, which are political in nature, siphon money that should be directed to its highest, best use to in the private sector.

The pair also ignores the waste, fraud, corruption and inefficiencies that plague government projects. Look no further than the California high-speed rail wreckage for a prime example. For those who need more, consider how Elon Musk’s private space company has made the once-grand NASA look like a done-the-night-before grade school science project.

Furthermore, Shapiro and Tomain celebrate the “countless economic benefits” of regulation while never mentioning the drag that regulation puts on our economy. Do they not know or simply not care that a single regulator costs the U.S. economy the equivalent of 138 private-sector jobs per year?

In chapter 14 of their book – which is titled “Joe Biden’s America” – Shapiro and Tomain recommend policymakers find “the balance between government and markets depends on the role of government right-sizing that balance by trying to restore confidence in American government and American democracy.”

Forget that we’re not a democracy. We’d like to know just where that “balance” lands as well as who gets to determine where the sweet spot is.

Is Congress filled with angels and geniuses who are equipped to twist the dial to the Goldilocks position? No, it’s been for decades dominated by statist demons who have set that “mix” in favor of the regulatory state and more recently the censorship regime.

From what we read, it’s clear these law professors believe that the private sector should be tethered and the government given charge of our economic lives. Maybe the reality has escaped them, but a freed economy needs no help from the government to prosper. All it needs from the state is to enforce the laws against theft and fraud, and to manage a civil justice system to enforce contracts and sort out disputes.

Government is a dangerous institution. As we have seen from its earliest versions, to 20th century communist and socialist dictatorships, to the fundamental transformation inflicted by the Obama and Biden administrations, government is almost always wielded like a club. There have been few instances throughout history in which government did no more than it should – securing rights, which existed before government, and defending borders.

While a necessity, government is nevertheless to be watched closely and kept in check. Government is not, as George Washington said, “reason,” nor is it “eloquence.”

“It is force. And force, like fire, is a dangerous servant and a fearful master.”

So, yes, by all means, let’s see how we get along without the “fearful master” at our throats.