Pete’s blog

Finally, the long-awaited, long-in-the-draft-box, third email in the series about voting and governments.

This one is going to explore a key question: what do you expect a government to do? What is a government’s role and how involved should they be? One of the key political and philosophical debates that has once again been brought to the fore by the recent financial crisis.

A barebones, slightly cynical description of government would be: an institute that determines people’s behaviour. The subtleties arise out of how you determine people’s behaviour and how large or small a role government plays. And this for all aspects of people’s lives and behaviours – religion, work, economics, education, science, etc.

First the question that everyone deals with every day of their lives – how do you get the behaviour you want out of other people? Be nasty, be nice? Encourage them, command them? Have strict rules, have general guidelines? Now if you want to know what your choices are, then there are a million psychology and management books out there that will give you ideas and theories on how to get the best results out of people. Governments may be bigger and deal with a lot more people, but the majority of theories still hold. So I am only going to go into the generalities.

First how do you enforce behaviour and prevent unwanted behaviour? A pretty a major choice really, but it comes down to two things – who determines or how do you determine the rules and regulations, and how do you enforce them. You can have a constitution that specifies the beliefs and rights of the society, a legal system to protect and codify those beliefs and rights, and a police and judicial system to regulate behaviour outside of these accepted norms – a modern constitutional democracy. Or you could have one person that determines all the rules and regulations – a monarchy or dictatorship. You could have a group of people that, in return for privileges, enforce the rules – feudalism. You could enforce the rules using military force – martial law. Or you could have a very strong police force to crack down on unwanted behaviour – a police state. Or pick and choose, mix and match – a single person that determines all the rules, but a legal, judicial and police system to enforce those rules; you could have a constitution to set the rules, but use military force to impose those laws; or a constitution for the rules, but a group of privileged people who can decide how they implement the constitution.

Next how narrow or broad should the laws be, and how strict should they be? You can command or you can regulate. Command is very narrow rules, where very little freedom is given. Commanding a market would be setting prices, quantities or products. The most extreme example would be something like communist Russia, where every output and product is determined and controlled by the state. Regulation is about broad rules that allow freedom, but prevent negative or unwanted behaviour. Regulating a market is about preventing monopolies, setting production quality standards, setting minimum wages, etc. Regulation is in many ways far better than command because it only requires you to look after things when they can or do go wrong and not absolutely everything, making it a lot easier and efficient. Most Americans would refer to these two systems as a command economy and a free-market economy. However for all Americans go on about free-markets, they have perhaps the largest regulatory bureaucracy in the world. It is not a free-market, it is a regulated market. When that regulation fails, then it can create situations like the current economic crisis.

And this brings us to the next choice – how much control or regulation? I only need to mention the recent financial meltdown and most of you will be saying, “yes, lots of regulation, regulation is good, a lack of regulation is bad.” Yes, a lack of regulation can be bad, and bad regulation can be worse, but regulation also stifles creativity, requires resources to manage and can sometime be very difficult to implement (like for example if no-one actually has any idea of how to value a Credit Default Swap).

For a change of perspective, I will stop talking about the economy for a second and tell you to think about control, command and regulation in terms of people… Everything I have just said about business and markets applies equally well to people. Control people or regulate people? How many of you are saying “I don’t want to be controlled or regulated at all!”? But the regulation of people is critical to maintaining society – getting locked in jail for life for killing another human is a type of regulation. A lot of the laws and regulations around people are pretty obvious – not having them would result in a disruption to society and interfere with the freedoms of other people. Murder, theft, fraud, law of contracts, property ownership laws, etc. But then there are the unclear areas, and the question of whether you regulate people for their own good and their own protection. Gay marriage? Does it impinge on other people’s rights? Drug use? Should people not be allowed to fry their brains in whatever manner they choose (as long as they do it in the privacy of their own home and not destructively in public)? The problem is also that some laws are accepted as being for the good of society by the majority (or sometimes the minority) and then imposed on everyone. Slavery and apartheid? Or more modern debates – immigration, intellectual property, religious education, etc. A lot of people would say that modern society has trended towards fewer restrictions on people and more freedom, however I would argue the opposite. We have far more regulations and laws, but these protect the freedoms of a far greater number of people. Groups of people in history had far more freedom than people today, but people in modern democracies have far more freedom.

Of course freedom of people is a very difficult thing to measure. Who is more free? A Somalian child, a Chinese child or an American child? An African-American living in a ‘ghetto’ or an American oil tycoon friend of George W Bush? A Vietnamese child working in a sweat shop or a Zimbabwean child with no work, no food and no money? And for all the examples I have listed, think of the role of their respective governments in their lives and in determining their freedoms.

The last question is: which aspects of society and people’s lives should government be involved in? Religion – theocracy? Not religion – secularism? Since both government and religion generally tell people how to live their lives, some people see no conflict between religion and government and so believe religion should form a key part of government. Others believe that religion is a personal choice and that religious beliefs should not be imposed by a state. Government’s involvement in science is a hot topic at the moment and it is only going to get hotter – climate change is a key area where government and science will increasingly overlap. Yet in the past, government involvement in science was primarily in military development. Education? Should government enforce a standard syllabus, or should it set a framework of outcomes which the educational institutions should achieve?

I should now hopefully have given you enough to think about governments and what they can do. Why not invade a small country and try out a few of the variations yourself? Play around and see what works and what doesn’t

For the next topic in this series I am going to try and tackle the really daunting question of “do we really need a government at all”?