What is the Role of the State?
Courtesy of Mark Thoma at Economist’s View
When I teach the History of Economic Thought, one thing we focus on is how views on the role of the state have changed over time. It has a natural cycle to it, with eras such as the highly interventionist Mercantilist years followed by Physiocratic and Classical views stressing minimal government intervention. This is followed by a rebound in the other direction, and so it goes with a Keynes followed by a Friedman in the 50s, a rebound back to Keynes in the 60s, to classical ideas following the experience of the 70s, and so on, and so on. We are involved in the same debate, and a smaller version of the grand historical lurches in each direction, yet again today:
What is the role of the state?, by Martin Wolf: It is … a good time to ask … the biggest question in political economy: what is the role of the state? This question has concerned western thinkers at least since Plato (5th-4th century BCE). It has also concerned thinkers in other cultural traditions… The perspective here is that of the contemporary democratic west.
The core purpose of the state is protection. This view would be shared by everybody, except anarchists… Contemporary Somalia shows the horrors that can befall a stateless society. Yet horrors can also befall a society with an over-mighty state. …
Mancur Olson argued that the state was a “stationary bandit”. A stationary bandit is better than a “roving bandit”, because the latter has no interest in developing the economy, while the former does. But it may not be much better, because those who control the state will seek to extract the surplus over subsistence generated by those under their control.
In the contemporary west, there are three protections against undue exploitation by the stationary bandit: exit, voice … and restraint. By “exit”, I mean the possibility of escaping from the control of a given jurisdiction, by emigration, capital flight or some form of market exchange. By “voice”, I mean a degree of control over, the state, most obviously by voting. By “restraint”, I mean independent courts, division of powers, federalism and entrenched rights.
This, then, is a brief background to … the problem, which is defining what a democratic state … is entitled to do. …
There exists a strand in classical liberal or, in contemporary US parlance, libertarian thought which believes the answer is to define the role of the state so narrowly and the rights of individuals so broadly that many political choices (the income tax or universal health care, for example) would be ruled out a priori. … I view this as a hopeless strategy…
So what ought the protective role of the state to include? Again, in such a discussion, classical liberals would argue for the “night-watchman”role. The government’s responsibilities are limited to protecting individuals from coercion, fraud and theft and to defending the country from foreign aggression.
Yet once one has accepted the legitimacy of using coercion (taxation) to provide the goods listed above, there is no reason in principle why one should not accept it for the provision of other goods that cannot be provided as well, or at all, by non-political means.
Those other measures would include addressing a range of externalities (e.g. pollution), providing information and supplying insurance against otherwise uninsurable risks, such as unemployment, spousal abandonment and so forth. The subsidization or public provision of childcare and education is a way to promote equality of opportunity. The subsidization or public provision of health insurance is a way to preserve life, unquestionably one of the purposes of the state. Safety standards are a way to protect people against the carelessness or malevolence of others or (more controversially) themselves. All these, then, are legitimate protective measures. The more complex the society and economy, the greater the range of the protections that will be sought.
What, then, are the objections to such actions? The answers might be: the proposed measures are ineffective..; the measures are unaffordable…; the measures encourage irresponsible behavior; and, at the limit, the measures restrict individual autonomy to an unacceptable degree. These are all, we should note, questions of consequences.
The vote is more evenly distributed than wealth and income. Thus, one would expect the tenor of democratic policymaking to be redistributive and so, indeed, it is. Those with wealth and income to protect will then make political power expensive to acquire and encourage potential supporters to focus on common enemies (inside and outside the country) and on cultural values. The more unequal are incomes and wealth and the more determined are the “haves” to avoid being compelled to support the “have-nots”, the more politics will take on such characteristics.
What are my personal views on how far the protective role of the state should go? In the 1970s, the view that democracy would collapse under the weight of its excessive promises seemed to me disturbingly true. I am no longer convinced of this… Moreover, the capacity for learning by democracies is greater than I had realized. The conservative movements of the 1980s were part of that learning. But they went too far in their confidence in market arrangements and their indifference to the social and political consequences of inequality. I would support state pensions, state-funded health insurance and state regulation of environmental and other externalities. I am happy to debate details.
The ancient Athenians called someone who had a purely private life “idiotes”. This is, of course, the origin of our word “idiot”. Individual liberty does indeed matter. But it is not the only thing that matters. The market is a remarkable social institution. But it is far from perfect. Democratic politics can be destructive. But it is much better than the alternatives. Each of us has an obligation, as a citizen, to make politics work as well as he (or she) can and to embrace the debate over a wide range of difficult choices that this entails.
Update: Read Martin Wolf’s response to readers’ comments
Protection, justice, correction of externalities, social insurance, and the provision of public goods (which I would like to have seen emphasized more above) are, in my view, legitimate roles of the state. I have more trouble when it comes to redistribution, I prefer that everyone have an equal chance in life with the chips falling where they may (with insurance against outcomes where individuals end up with too few chips). But redistribution to correct problems associated with, say, uncorrected market failures that redistribute income unfairly, or to compensate for an unequal playing field more generally, is another matter.
