The artificial mechanics of competitive political tendering, which produce the equally artificial result of finely balanced electoral indeterminacy, must of course be taken with a pinch of salt. Neither the state nor its opposition, no matter how coldly professional and competent at engineering electoral platforms,
could possibly formulate patterns of seduction with anything like the precision required for our result. Nor would all voters correctly understand and evaluate the prices that were being bid for their support, i.e. the incidence on their income of complex redistributive policies. Many of these might be presented to look more lucrative to the gainers or less costly to the losers than the probable reality. Ignorance, the unpredictability of true incidence and the opacity of social and economic matter, would handicap not only the electorate but also those seeking to gain its support. Even if both competitors used the same data, the same surveys sold by the same pollsters, they could not risk sailing this close to each other. In reality, the coveted middle ground, too, must be much broader than in our illustration, and its benefits from redistribution more diluted.
Nevertheless, for all their artificiality, observing the workings of our schema of electoral democracy is more useful than looking at the mere spinning of wheels. It confirms in the simplest possible manner an intuitively plausible presumption: that material interest alone is insufficient to determine the award of power to one contender rather than another, for the contenders, even if they carry different flags, end up by appealing to substantially the same interests, which they attract by holding out much the same payoff. The more familiar corollary of this is the "convergence of programmes," the tendency (which some consider a strength of democracy) to narrow down the range within which policies (as well as the images candidates for high office must project) remain electorally viable. The obverse of this coin, of course, is the complaint of the non-conformists that electoral democracy precludes genuine, distinctive alternatives; the very principle of popular choice leads to there being little to choose from.
Our account of the "pure," rich-to-middle tax-and-transfer kind of redistribution which the state, confronted by rivals in electoral democracy, would adopt under certain simplifying assumptions, is to a general theory of redistribution as, in economics, perfect competition is to a full theory of producers' behaviour. It is a stepping stone or heuristic device without whose help more general propositions might not emerge clearly enough. Though I neither claim, nor require for my arguments, to propose a general theory of redistribution, I do sketch some likely looking components of such a theory in the rest of this chapter. Their intent is to explain some of the dynamics of how civil society, once it grows addicted to redistribution, changes its character and comes to require the state to "feed its habit." From benefactor and seducer, the role of the state changes to that of drudge, clinging to an illusory power and only just able to cope with an inherently thankless task.
4.2.28 We have learnt that consent is, by and large, not bought with acts of once-for-all state help to the majority at the expense of the minority. Help and hindrance must be processes, to maintain a stipulated state of affairs which, without such maintenance, would revert to something rather (though never exactly) like what it was before. The beast must be fed continually. If this must be performed under conditions of open democratic competition, whatever of its subjects' liberty and property the state manages to appropriate, must be redistributed to others. If it does not do so, the redistributive offer of its competitor would beat its own and power would change hands. Tenure of power, then, is contingent upon its not being used at the state's discretion. The resources over which it gives command must be totally devoted to the purchase of power itself. Thus, receipts equal costs, output equals input. The analogy with the firm which, in equilibrium, can by maximizing profit do no more than earn its factor costs (including the entrepreneur's wages), is compelling.
We are nearing the heart of the matter, bumping as we do at this juncture into the theory of the state. If the point in being the state were to have power (that is, if that were the state's maximand, its end), it would mean very little to say that the state has maximized it in the situation whose equilibrium conditions we have deduced above. Social power, as we know from Max Weber, is its holder's capacity to make, by recourse to combinations of physical force and legitimacy, another do what he would not have otherwise done. The quintessential democratic state has the capacity to make given subjects in civil society surrender to it given parts of their good. They would not have done it without its "power." But it has no capacity to make them surrender any more nor any less. It would lose "power" if it tried. It must tax the subset S of society an amount T, and it must distribute T' to another subset U. It cannot alter either S or U, it cannot vary T nor have T' fall short of it. It must not indulge its sympathies, follow its tastes, pursue its hobbies, "make policy" and generally promote the good as it conceives it, on pain of being booted out.*12 Though it can make another do something the latter would not have done, it cannot choose what it will make him do. It lacks the other essential attribute of power: discretion.
If power as an end in itself meant "being in power," it would not matter to the power-holder that he must use it in one unique way, only for this and not for that, as long as he held it. But it would make for shallow theory to put this in the role of maximand. By the same token, we would get only a theory of snobbery if we were to put holding a title of nobility as the purpose of the noble's existence, stripping out estates, privileges, ethos and social and
economic functions. The state could not use this residual sort of power, nor seek more of it. It could only have or not have it. If it were satisfied with it, pure electoral democracy would be a sort of terminal stage of political development, and our argument would be substantially at an end.
But while relief from further labours might be a pleasant by-product for the writer and his reader, allowing the state to be motivated by such a shallow, near-empty concept of power would grossly misrepresent historical experience. It would contradict, or at least leave unexplained, the state's evident striving over most of modern history for more autonomy, for discretion in deciding what it will make people do. Only the will to have power as a means can properly explain that. The logic of competition, however, is such that democratic power in the limit becomes the antithesis of power as a means to freely chosen ends.
That the wheel thus comes round full circle is yet another illustration of the distant consequences of actions in and upon society being mostly unintended, unforeseen or both. A state seeking to govern mainly by consent instead of by repression cum legitimacy, may have fallen victim to lack of foresight, weakness of will or inconsistency. But it might equally well have been rational, when seeking greater freedom of manoeuvre, readier obedience, lesser reliance on narrow class support-in short, when seeking more discretionary power-to look for it in democratic reforms, in increasing reliance on consent. At the outset, it positively provoked its subjects to make demands upon it, as a vendor might drum up custom for his wares by passing out samples and testimonials, in order to create a political market in which consent could be earned in exchange for state provision of utility and equality. At the end of the day (most such days lasting
about a century), such states found themselves, in a special but quite precise sense, virtually powerless, having their policies decided for them by the need of competitive electoral equilibrium and generally running hard to stay in the same place. It is academic to ask whether they could have foreseen this sort of result. Plainly, they have not. In exoneration, they had less warning than Adam before he ate from the tree of knowledge.
4.2.33
Author: Jasay, Anthony de Title: The State
Anthony de Jasay
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4. RedistributionAddictive Redistribution
Help and need feed upon one another; their interaction can give rise to uncontrolled cumulative processes.
4.3.0
By
helping to create entitlements and to form interest groups, the state changes society in its image and at its peril.
Redistribution is potentially addictive in two distinct though related respects. One concerns the behaviour of persons and families-society's fine-grained basic stuff. The other acts upon groups, affecting in so doing the coarser, more visibly "structural" features of society. Fusing the two into a single group theory (since we could always say that families are small groups and isolated individuals are incomplete groups) might have had the elegance of greater generality, but the split treatment seems to me clearer.
The root ideas concerning the habit-forming effects of redistribution on persons and families are old and well worn. Their public acceptance reached its zenith with Cobden and Herbert Spencer (to whom one might add the peculiarly American phenomenon of W. G. Sumner). For no better reason than the boringness of virtue, they have since lost much of their currency.*13 Victorian homilies about self-reliance, about God helping those who help themselves and about the corrupting effect of charity, have practically disappeared from public discourse. On the other hand, the fully fledged welfare state has now been functioning long enough, and it has permeated the life of broad enough strata in society, to make it possible for theorizing to take the place of moralizing about these matters. A general sort of hypothesis would suppose that a person's behaviour over some period is affected, in a number of unspecified ways, by the receipt of unrequited help in the past or present period. Filling the empty box, it would be reasonable to assume, for instance, that receipt of help makes people consider future help more probable. Some of the self-reinforcing cumulative features of the provision of social
welfare would inspire the more specific hypothesis that the more a person is helped in his need, and the higher he rates the probability of the help forthcoming (until, in the limiting case of certainty, he ends up by having entitlements), the more his conduct will be reliant on it.
In line with the normal relation between practice and capacity, therefore, the more he is helped, the lesser will become his capacity to help himself. Help over time forms a habit of reliance on, and hence the likelihood of a need for, help. Habit, moreover, is not simply temporary adjustment to passing conditions. It implies more than changes in momentary, short-term behaviour. It involves a longer-term, quasi-permanent adaptation of the parameters of behaviour: it changes character. These changes may to some extent be irreversible. Withdrawal of the help in question becomes progressively harder to bear and adjust to; at some stage, it attains the proportions of personal catastrophe, social crisis and political impracticability. The noise and turmoil provoked by contemporary Dutch, British, German, Swedish and American attempts (I am listing them in what seems to me their order of seriousness) marginally to rein in welfare expenditures as a proportion of national product, lend themselves well to being interpreted as "withdrawal symptoms" in a condition where the addict requires a progressively larger dose of the addictive substance to "feed his habit."*14
There are straightforward ways in which the adaptation of behaviour and character to the public aids that are forthcoming, is capable of setting off the self-feeding processes which can be discerned in heavily redistributive societies. For instance, a degree of public care for the welfare of mothers and children relieves, if it does not remove altogether, the most pressing material need for
family cohesion. Reassurance about the minimum needs of mother and child will induce some (not necessarily substantial) proportion of fathers to desert them who might not have done so otherwise. (As connoisseurs of the American Great Society era will recall, publicly diagnosing this phenomenon has brought much undeserved abuse and charges of racist arrogance on Daniel
P. Moynihan's head, though his facts stood up very well to theattacks.) Their desertion, in turn, disables the truncated residual family unit, greatly reducing its capacity to look after itself. Hence a need arises for more attention and more comprehensive assistance to one-parent families. Once reliably provided, such aid in turn encourages some (initially perhaps small) proportion of unmarried young women to have children (or to have them early). In this way, additional incomplete families are formed. They have little capacity for fending for themselves. Hence the need for public assistance further expands, even as reliance on it becomes widespread enough to cease to offend class or community standards of respectable conduct.
Much the same kind of reaction may be set off by public care for old people, relieving their children of a responsibility and contributing both to the self-sufficiency and the loneliness of grandparents who, but for state care, would be living with their descendants as a matter of course. By the same token, some of the people who would have produced and reared children as the most basic form of old-age insurance, now rely on the state insuring them instead. Whether the consequent reduction in the birth rate is a good thing or not, it sets off demographic shock waves which can unpleasantly rock society for a couple of generations, among other things by endangering the finances of the Ponzi-letter scheme of unfunded public old-age "insurance."
Analogous processes, where effects become causes of further effects of the same Janus-faced kind, may be at work in (or at least are consistent with) many other areas of redistributive action. Their common feature is the adaptation of long-run personal and family behaviour to the availability of unrequited aids, which are first passively accepted, then claimed and ultimately, in the course of time, come to be regarded as enforceable rights (e.g. the right not to be hungry, the right to health care, the right to a formal education, the right to a secure old age).
Such adaptations are obviously liable to leave some people happier and others, perhaps even some among the beneficiaries of state help, unhappier, though it looks very problematical to say anything more than this. Something, however, can be said about some wider political implications, notably in terms of the environment in which the state operates and seeks to attain its ends. Functions which used to be performed by a person for himself (e.g. saving for retirement) or by the family for its members (e.g. looking after the sick, the very young and the very old) in a decentralized fashion, autonomously, more or less spontaneously if not always lovingly, neither will nor can any longer be so performed. They will be performed instead by the state, more regularly, more comprehensively, perhaps more fully and by recourse to coercion.
The assumption of these functions by the state carries with it side-effects of some momentum. They affect the balance of power between the individual and civil society on one side, the state on the other. Moreover, the addictive nature of social welfare and the fact that its beneficiaries can generally "consume" it at nil or negligible marginal cost to themselves, powerfully influence the scale on which it will be produced. It seems plausible to argue that
as the disabling, dependence-creating effects of aid are unintended, so is in the last analysis the scale of redistribution to produce social welfare. It is yet another example of the disconcerting habit of social phenomena to get out of control and assume shapes and sizes their initiators might never have envisaged. In the face of the habit-forming feedbacks at work, it is doubly unsatisfactory to apply to this particular form of redistribution the fiction of some deliberate social choice.*15
4.3.9 Partial loss of control over the scale of production of social welfare, and over the corresponding expenditure, is an important aspect of the predicament of the adversary state. I will revert to it when considering the phenomenon of "churning." However, I have only just begun to look at addictive redistribution and have yet to consider the workings of the sort of redistribution which fosters the proliferation of distinct, cohesive groups in society that, in turn, exact more redistribution.
4.3.10 Let us now put behind us the simplifying assumptions of an amorphous, structureless society which gave us the neat equilibrium solution of the preceding section on "buying consent." Society is now more like it is in reality, with its members being differentiated from each other by countless unequal
attributes, among which the source of their livelihood (farming, lending money, working for IBM), their domicile (town or country, capital or province), their status (worker, capitalist, lumpen-intellectual, etc.) are but a few of the more obvious ones. People who differ from others in a number of respects can be sorted into groups according to any and each of these respects. Each member of society can be simultaneously a member of as many groups as he has attributes in common with somebody else. All members of a given group resemble each other in at least one respect, though differing in many or all others.
The State by Anthony de Jasay Page 26