The State by Anthony de Jasay

by Anthony de Jasay

  An equally commonplace argument leads from "industrial policies" to churning. Whether to promote its growth or to save it from decline and extinction, the political benefit from helping a business firm or an industry (especially as it "provides jobs") is likely to exceed the political damage caused by a small and diffuse increase in the costs faced by other firms and industries. The upshot, then, is that it is good for the democratic state to make every industry support every other in various, more or less opaque ways.*31 There results a broad overlap of self-cancelling gains and losses, leaving perhaps only narrow slivers of some net gain here, some net loss there. Quite where any such slivers are located must itself be in some doubt. Given the intricate nature of the social and economic stuff that is being churned, it is altogether on the cards both that the industry which was meant to be helped was actually harmed, and that nobody can tell for sure which way any net effect went, if there was any at all.

  Another strand of the argument about churning is the apparent asymmetry between the capacities of democratic states to say yes and to say no. Resisting pressure, rejecting the demands of an interest or simply refraining from doing some good for which there is much disinterested support, more often than not has an immediate, indisputable and perhaps menacing political cost. The political benefit of saying no, on the other hand, is usually long-term, speculative and slow to mature. It is devalued by the

  discount that insecurity of tenure places on distant pay-offs, as well as by the trivial "drop in the bucket" nature of most individual yes-or-no choices.

  In a richly differentiated society with a large variety of concerns and interests, the state is constantly making numbers of small decisions in favour or against some such interest, each merely involving "a million here and a million there." Admittedly, their sum soon runs to billions and, with "a billion here and a billion there, soon you are talking real money." Yet none of the individual decisions takes the state in one leap from the realm of millions to the realm of real money. The day of reckoning is in any case more than a week away ("a long time in politics"), and as compromises and the fudging of issues have a sui generis advantage over "polar" solutions, the state usually ends up by at least partially satisfying any given demand. However, both Peter and Paul have frequent occasions for making various demands upon the state; the more times they have successfully demanded in the past, the more often are they likely to present demands now. As the bias of the system is such that the state tends to say at least a partial "yes" to the bulk of them, the major result is bound to be churning. Both Peter and Paul will be paid on several counts by robbing both of them in a variety of more or less transparent ways, with a possibly quite minor net redistribution in favour of Paul emerging as the residual by-product.

  A corollary of the above is that some people or groups will gain from some direct or unintended redistributive arrangements while losing much the same sums from others. Not all can, let alone will, see through this and recognize their net position, if indeed a net position has objective meaning. Since economic policy causes prices and factor incomes to be other than what they would be in a

  policyless capitalist state, and since it may in any case be inherently impossible to "know" the ultimate incidence of the total set of directives, incentives, prohibitions, taxes, tariffs, etc. in force, a subject need not be stupid to be mistaken about where the churning around him really leaves him.*32

  It is in the state's interest to foster systematic error.*33 The more people think they are gainers and the fewer who resent this, the cheaper it is-crudely speaking-to split society into two moderately unequal halves and secure the support of the preponderant half. With free entry into the competition for state power and hence the extreme unlikelihood of collusion among the rivals, however, the opposition must seek to dissipate systematic error as fast as the state succeeds in inducing it, in fact to induce systematic error of the opposite sign by telling the gainers that they are losers. Whoever is in power in democratic states, it is the steady endeavour of the opposition to persuade the broad middle class that it is paying more in taxes than it is getting back, and to tell the working class (if such an old-fashioned category is still admitted to exist) that the burden of the welfare state really rests on its back. (When in opposition, "right" and "left" both arrive at some such conclusion from opposite premises, roughly as follows: living standards of working people are too low because profits are too low/too high.) Whatever the real influence of these debates, there is no good reason to assume that they simply cancel each other out. It seems a priori probable that the more highly developed and piecemeal is the redistributive system and the more difficult it is to trace its ramifications, the more scope there must be for false consciousness, for illusions and for downright mistakes by both the state and its subjects.

  Contrary to the sharp-edged outcome of a pure rich-to-middle redistributive auction in a homogenous single-interest society (see pp. 218-23), complex, addictive, heterogenous interest-group churning seems to produce a much fuzzier pattern. Very probably it can produce several such patterns and we cannot really predict which one it will be. Since there is a large number of alternative ways in which a highly differentiated, disparate society's multiplicity of interests can be lined up on two nearly equal sides, there is no longer a presumption (such as I have established for a homogenous society) of one best, unbeatable pattern of redistribution which a political competitor can match but not outbid. Hence, there need be no strong tendency either for the convergence of programmes or the disappearance of genuine political alternatives. A somewhat rightist and a recognizably leftist policy can be serious rivals of each other.

  Any rivalry, however, still entails competing offers of some net transfer of money, services, favours or liberties from some people to others, for with other things equal, he who makes some such offer can, under simple everyday assumptions about why people support a policy, generate more support than he who makes none. This is the case even if there is much fuzziness about the shape of the winning offer (note that a deterministic reliance on "natural constituencies" and on the programmes which either constituency imposes on its champion, will not do; many interests no longer fit into any natural constituency, left, right, conservative or socialist, but swell the "swing middle" which must be bought). Our theory becomes blurred, as it probably should in its descent to a progressively less abstract level.

  The central thrust of the theory, however, does not get altogether lost. With tenure heavily dependent on the consent of its own

  subjects, competition still drives the state into some redistributive auction. The comparability of rival offers is more limited than in the abstract rich-to-middle tax-and-transfer version. There is no longer one simultaneous tender offer of a coherent set of positive and negative payments for support, addressed to particular segments of society. Instead, there is a prolonged cascade (perhaps ebbing and flowing with the electoral calendar), of quite diverse aids and fines, bounties and bans, tariffs and refunds, privileges and hindrances, some of which may be difficult to quantify. The opposition cascade is promise, the state cascade is, at least in part, performance. Comparison of the two is evidently not a light undertaking for a person with manifold concerns ranging from civil rights to the mortgage on his house, fair trade in his business and poor teaching at his children's school, to name but a few in random order.

  Rival offers need not be closely similar, nor need they completely exhaust the whole potential "pay-off" available for redistribution. The concept of the potential pay-off itself must be reinterpreted in a less precise manner. It can no longer be treated as co-extensive with taxable capacity, the less so as a good deal of redistribution is an indirect result of various state policies and totally bypasses taxes. When all this is duly said, however, political competition still means that neither rival can afford to content itself with offering much lower net redistributive gains than its tentative estimate of the net loss it can safely impose on the losers.

  The interd
ependence, within any differentiated social system, between who gets what and who does what, and the few commonplace assumptions about psychology and the working of consent-dependent political regimes, introduced in this section, steer the

  issue from competitive equilibrium to what I propose to call the last democratic dilemma.

  Over and above any direct redistribution, a great deal of indirect churning will be generated. The state will also engage, off its own bat and responding to piecemeal political incentives, in additional direct churning. The addictive effect of (gross) gains under churning, notably the stimulus provided to interest group proliferation, is likely to cause churning to grow over time despite the absence and quasi-impossibility of further net gains. False consciousness, systematic error, a degree of producer-consumer schizophrenia and some free-riding bias in group action in favour of extorting gains (and never mind that after every other group has extorted its gain, the first group's share in the resulting total of costs will have wiped out its gain)-all these deviations may suffice to offset, up to some point, the inconveniences and costs of churning and still produce political benefits on balance. The more churning there is, however, the more the balance is liable to tip over, both because more churning takes more government, more overriding of mutually acceptable private contracts, more state influence over the disposal of incomes and the rights of property (which may upset one half of society), and because of some perhaps dim, inarticulated frustration, anger and disappointment that so much redistributive ado is at the end of the day mainly about nothing (which may upset the other half).

  Rather like the individual political hedonist who finds that as the state increases the pleasure it bestows, after some point (which he may or may not have actually reached yet) the accompanying pain increases faster and it would be best if one could just stop before quite getting there, society is also likely to reach some point of marginal pleasure-pain equivalence where "it would like to stop."

  However, there is no operative meaning in this "would like to." Society cannot call a stop, nor can it make any other decision (though majorities can make a limited range of decisions in its name and the representatives of the majority can decide additional matters in its name, and the state may carry them out in their name, none of which is in dispute here). Should it find too much of its arrangements churned more than it feels is congenial or indeed tolerable, society has no obvious recourse against the democratic political process which yielded this result. It may respond with uncomprehending rage, with what former French President Valery Giscard d'Estaing aptly called "morose turbulence" and sullen cynicism. Its frustration will obviously threaten the political survival of the state which, by inadvertence, line of least resistance and the pressures of the social structure called forth by its own consent-seeking, has pushed churning too far.

  On the other hand, net goes with gross, genuine redistribution is accompanied by churning. If continued tenure of power dictates a certain genuine redistribution, a growing volume of churning on top of it is nearly certain to be induced for one good reason and another. Yet if the former is consistent with political survival, the latter may be excessive for it. There may consequently no longer be any possible political equilibrium position, not even one of unrewarding state drudgery. A genuine existential impasse may be reached: the state both must and must not redistribute.

  It is this contradiction which conditions the mixed-up, disoriented split personality of many present-day democratic states.*34 Ideology must go hand in hand with interest. In recent years, the dominant ideology of Western democracy has been cautiously coopting a sprinkling of previously rejected elements of theoretical

  anarchism, libertarianism and traditional individualism; before we know where we are, Herbert Spencer will be radical chic. On a less cerebral plane, deeply felt claims mount for "rolling back the state." As the quarter-turn of ideological fashion unfailingly signals, it has in a sense become clever policy for the state to roll itself back.

  Torn between a rational interest to go on producing the "democratic values" that the beneficiaries have taught themselves to depend on (and at least to continue upholding if not furthering the group interests whose support it cannot afford to forgo), and an equally rational interest to respond to the mounting poujadisme, frustration and ungovernability of much the same people and much the same interests by doing virtually the opposite, the state twists and turns and explains away its own incoherent evolutions with incoherent rhetoric. In two minds, by fits and starts fighting its own nature, it resists its own attempts to make itself shrink.

  Author: Jasay, Anthony de Title: The State

  Anthony de Jasay

  Advanced Search 4. RedistributionTowards a Theory of the State

  It would be rational for a state pursuing its own ends to escape from the treadmill where its power is used up in its own reproduction.

  Did Plato's Republic "degenerate" on the way from democracy to despotism?

  This is the place for drawing some of our threads closer together. Depending on the scale and perspective of the analysis, it is possible to regard the state in several ways. One is to take it as an inanimate tool, a machine. It has no ends and no will; only persons have ends. Explanation and prediction of its movements must, therefore, deal at one remove with the persons who wield the tool and shift the levers of the machine. Another is to merge the machine and the people who run it, and consider the state as a live institution which behaves as it would if it had a will of its own and a single hierarchy of ends; as if it could choose between alternatives and in doing so seemed to conform to the rudiments of rationality. We have throughout adopted the latter view, not because it is more realistic (neither is), but because it looks the most fertile in plausible deductive consequences.

  Once we think of the state as having ends and a will of its own, theories and doctrines which have the state serve the interests of Hobbes's seekers after eminence, Rousseau's myopic deer-hunters or Engels's oppressor class, take on a strongly question-begging quality: for however convincing the accounts they give of how the state could or does serve such interests, they furnish no reason why it should serve them. Yet while the supposition that a will seeks the fulfilment of its ends can be taken as read (it is implicit in rationality; besides, it is hard to think of a will floating freely, not associated with any end), a supposition that it seeks to serve the ends of others needs justification, explicit support of some sort. There is, in my view, no such support for it in either the contractarian or the Marxist theory of the state. It may, in fact, be a misnomer to call either one a theory of the state, though they are both theories of the individual (or class) subject's interest in the state. Moreover, as I have contended in chapter 1, even if it had good reasons to, the state could not pursue the interests of its subjects unless they were homogenous. Its adversary relation to them is inherent in its having to take one side or the other between conflicting interests if it is to have any "policies" at all.

  A successful theory of the state should not have to rely on the gratuitous assumption that the state is subservient to some interest other than its own. It should lend itself to the explanation of the state's role in political history in terms of its interest interacting, competing, conflicting with and duly adjusted to the interests of others.*35

  What, however, is the proper view of the interests of the state? When do we say that it is using its power to fulfil its ends? I have from the outset reconciled the possibility of "minimalness" and rationality by laying down the "marker" that a state will choose to

  be minimal ("capitalist," "policyless"-alternative terms I consider to have substantially the same effect as "minimal"), if its ends lie beyond politics and cannot be attained by the use of power-if they are not the satisfactions of governing. On the other hand, all the policies a non-minimal state does adopt are, tautologically, in its interest, in the fulfilment of its ends, except when it is being foolish. Some of these policies, however, can yet be told apart from the others. I
nto this split, the thin end of a theory of the state might be wedged.

  Certain policies, and the specific measures they call for, can at least conceptually be singled out as having a common negative feature: they appear to contribute to no plausible end, satisfy no manifest taste, augment no conceivable enjoyment of the state other than the maintenance of its tenure. They just help keep it in power. They use power in order to reproduce it. If it is right to say that Roman senators felt no altruistic love for the plebs, yet gave them bread and circuses, they "must have" done so because it seemed to them necessary for the maintenance of the existing order. If one can take it that Richelieu did not actually prefer townsmen to nobles, yet favoured the former and sought to weaken the latter, he "must have" done so in order to consolidate royal power. (The "must have" is in inverted commas to invite the reader's complicity and indulgence. So much of historical explanation is, inevitably and I think properly, no more than the elevation of the least unreasonable hypothesis to the rank of the true cause.)