Posted by
KWG on Tuesday, May 20, 2008 10:53:40 AM
The United States Congress is a body that consistently ranks with incredibly low approval ratings from the people that it serves. Lower, of course, than the much-ballyhooed low approval rating that George W. Bush gets. Yet in an amusing way, those same people who give Congress as an entire body a terrible mark usually approve of the job their local Congressman is doing.
This, of course, makes no sense. For some reason, the “Congress is rotten… but my guy’s okay” mentality pervades the American electorate. This leads to over-90% incumbency rates in both the House and the Senate, ridiculous in light of their own approval ratings.
A parallel can be drawn directly with the government’s actions. Just like the people disapprove of their government institutions as a whole yet favor their personal representatives, they disapprove of big government and wasteful spending… unless that’s being done on themselves. Of course, most government programs are spend somewhere on something, so typically, a wasteful program is still going to have more vocal support than myriad detractors.
This is a problem of collective action. Those who benefit from unnecessary government spending and programs are going to be far more concerned about losing it than those passive Americans who are worried about runaway spending but have many other issues on their plate.
It is the hesitance to action and desire to value those government programs that benefit the self that has gotten us to this big-government point in history. It is a “soft” tyranny, a “milder” despotism that now permeates out lives. This path that the American government has undertaken has been foretold by many people. The Anti-Federalists, writing in the time of constitutional ratification, feared the many powers that the new government would have. Thirty years into the American Experiment, Alexis de Tocqueville saw the dangers that American freedom would face.
“It would seem that if despotism were to be established among the democratic nations of our days, it might assume a different character; it would be more extensive and less mild; it would degrade men without tormenting them.”
The degradation of will and character, the submission to the all-powerful and ever-growing State would lead men, de Tocqueville said, into a state in which Americans simply would be unable, in any, way, shape, or form to live without the aid of government’s benevolence.
“The will of man is not shattered [by the state], but softened, bent, and guided; men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.”
The utter inability to cut or even limit the growth of new government spending is becoming more and more disheartening by the day. The collective action problem prevents any but the most well-funded and active group of citizens from making any impact at all. Perhaps government has not yet truly become the shepherd, but it is the supplier of such perceived indispensables it has become the mother, allowing the American people to suckle its great resources.