The End of Governing

October 19, 2024

Governments worldwide are doing less with more. So says a recent analysis in The Economist. The share of GDP consumed by the public sector has been inexorably rising, but actual stuff accomplished by governments is declining.

Much government activity is paying out benefits; as people live longer and often retire earlier (having grown richer). Retirement ages should be raised to reflect modern realities, but try selling that to voters (France’s leaders notably failing). So benefit “entitlements” increasingly hog government budgets, crowding out spending on other public goods.

Taxes should be higher, to fund those needs. Try selling that too to voters. They want their cake while eating it — lots of benefits and services, but lower taxes. Politicians struggling to square that circle resort to ever more borrowing. Eventually that will become unsustainable; the reckoning ugly.

Pakistan and Kenya have lately seen riots against tax rises and spending cuts. Top Eurocrat Mario Draghi on September 9 issued a 400-page report detailing what’s needed for EU revitalization — costing nearly $1 trillion. To be borrowed. That won’t happen.

Another European leader, Jean-Claude Juncker, once said, “We all know what to do, we just don’t know how to get re-elected after we’ve done it.”

So governments become ineffectual, almost paralyzed. And unhelpful thickets of regulation and red tape often exist for a reason. Political scientist Francis Fukuyama has written of “vetocracy,” wherein one interest can stymie all others — because that one has a big stake, and accordingly fights hard, while no one else cares that much about the matter.

A big cause of high rents and house prices is insufficient new construction. Government could help a lot just by getting out of the way, but seems incapable even of that. Great Britain exemplifies this, its severe housing shortage aggravated by no-build “green belts” surrounding cities. Nice idea, but those belts have become mostly wastelands. The new Labour government has pledged to bulldoze through this. We’ll see.

Britain’s headline public program is the National Health Service. Whose ballooning costs make for service cutbacks. Meantime there a massive rail project was mostly abandoned after zillions were spent that seem to have actually lengthened travel times.

America is plagued by infrastructure under-investment. Trump’s repetitive “infrastructure week” was laughable bullshit. But President Biden seemed to have actually accomplished something great in finally getting a massive infrastructure bill passed. However, that initiative still must fight its way through a dense jungle of nimbyism. Discouragingly, The Economist notes that so far U.S. infrastructure spending in his term is down.

Such dysfunctionality has not gone unnoticed by voters. Explaining a lot of the populist politics we’ve been seeing. People have soured on government. Many have just given up on it.

Especially deadly for left/liberals that have romanticized the notion of activist government serving the common weal. They’re like battered spouses still professing love no matter how often their innamorata disappoints and even brutalizes them.

When folks no longer expect much from government, this guts the meaningfulness of the whole political sphere, alienating them from it. Not seeing themselves as participants in a greater community. Thus ripe for being corralled into a tribalistic us-against-them mentality. If government is useless anyway, and serious-minded action pointless, why not just indulge your baser instincts and lash out at whoever you see as not-you. Something demagogues like Trump exploit.

And of course, for all their “I alone can fix it” shtick, such leaders are bad at making government actually deliver. Putting them in office only makes things worse — so people grow all the more cynical and disaffected. A vicious circle of nihilism.

Reasoned argument becomes futile. In contrast to past times, that I remember, when there were real public debates over issues, on a more or less serious plane, with citizens informed by actual facts gleaned from responsible sources like newspapers, magazines, and broadcast news. Now people get “news” (if you call it that) from shallow sleazebags on TikTok and the like.

This in turn explains why truthfulness no longer matters in American politics. For most voters now, Trump’s lying on a brobdingnagian scale (and other vile misdeeds) form just a hazy blur. They can’t even see what January 6 meant.

No surprise he’s getting half the vote. He’s the more neon personality, with far greater entertainment value. That’s what really matters, isn’t it?

In this budding Idiocracy.