Largess or entitlement

View 718 Thursday, March 29, 2012

I’m preparing for the big Space Command conference in Colorado Springs next week. Eric is over and we will try again to build the new machine. And we continue to find new attractive features in the Thermaltake case.

I have mail calling my attention to Dr. David Brin’s disquisition on what he calls “The Largesse Canard”,  and since it says

Among those who have carelessly bandied this smugly cynical assertion has been sci fi author Jerry Pournelle, along with many of his more right wing colleagues. It circulates widely among the dour Rothbardians and Randites who dominate today’s warped version of the libertarian movement….

http://davidbrin.blogspot.com/2012/03/who-is-insulting-middle-class.html

I suppose I should say something.

First, “The Largesse Canard”. I don’t know what, precisely, that means. The statement in question is the familiar ‘quote’ to the effect that a democracy can last only until the citizens discover they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury, after which the democracy will destroy itself. The sentiment has been around a long time. Dr. Brin claims it originated with Plato, and perhaps so, but I never found it there. The most familiar version is credited to A Scots lawyer named Tytler whose works are not familiar to me, but who was apparently read by some of the Framers before the Convention of 1787. It reads

A democracy is always temporary in nature; it simply cannot exist as a permanent form of government. A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover that they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury.

There are some who say that Tytler never said that, and this may well be so, although I don’t know that anyone claims that he would have rejected the statement: he was certainly no advocate of democracy. Dr. Brin says this is ‘The Largesse Canard’. The definition of canard is “a false or unfounded report or story; especially : a fabricated report” so I presume he means that it is a canard that Tytler ever said this.

I would have said that is the wrong question to ask. I really don’t care who first made the observation. The question is not whether it was said by Tytler, or Plato, or originated with someone in a campaign staff in 1828 or 2000: the question is whether or not it is a valid observation. Attributing it to Plato may be thought of as an appeal to authority, but this is the first time I have been invited to think Plato said it (he certainly never did say it in that form) – and I really don’t care if it was said by an 18^th Century Scots lawyer whose works I haven’t read (and in fact I don’t know anyone who has read Tytler). I don’t consider Tytler an authority to begin with.

As to whether the observation is true, substitute the word ‘entitlement’ for ‘largesse’ and it certainly is not obviously false; it is at least worth considering.

It was not all that long ago that everyone in America understood that this nation wasn’t founded as a democracy, and that democracy, having been considered by the Framers, was rejected for a constitutional republic of limited and precisely defined powers. As to democracy, most of the founding figures of the American Republic rejected it flatly. John Adams was particularly vigorous in his rejection:

Democracy… while it lasts is more bloody than either aristocracy or monarchy. Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There is never a democracy that did not commit suicide.
John Adams

Cicero certainly rejected democracy in favor of a Republic, by which he meant a mixed government that contained elements of monarchy, aristocracy, and popular democracy in a mixture with checks and balances – and that is what the delegates to the Convention of 1787 thought they had achieved. Very few of them favored a democracy, and the fact that they had not created a democracy was known and they were attacked for it. The Federalist Papers – which I would think far more relevant than a Scots lawyer – dealt with that subject in some detail.

I would not think that dismissing the argument that democracies are in danger of destabilizing themselves, and in particular of overspending on entitlements – largesse, if you will – because there is some doubt as to the source of the assertion would be the right way to approach a point of political philosophy which has, after all, been a topic of debate among political philosophers from Plato and Aristotle to the present day. It is a tendency of democracies to vote entitlements – pork if you like – and to transfer resources from the productive to the non-productive. That would seem to be one of the issues this election is all about. Have entitlements gone too far? Can we continue to borrow money from China in order to fund entitlements? Should we tax the productive to fund bureaucracies? I would have thought these more relevant questions. Note that they are not ‘yes or no’ questions, either. As Niven often observes, rich societies can afford many uneconomic things, including bashing down the curbs to make life somewhat easier for the handicapped, but only wealthy societies can do that for long. Once you get in the habit of doing it, it’s hard to stop when you aren’t rich any more.

There was a time when there was a fairly widespread agreement about entitlements. There were some who said they weren’t big enough, and some who said there ought not be any, but the larger part of the American populace had accepted much of the New Deal and its entitlements. Over time they expanded. Social Security began adding payments to disabled people who had never worked and never would work, and certainly had not paid anything into the Social Security accounts – in other words, from a kind of insurance (with some Ponzi elements in it) Social Security became a system for transfer of money from the able who earned to the disabled who did not. That is largesse. It may be a good idea – but it is certainly not what Social Security was designed to be. It is certainly largesse paid from the public treasury. And it can be a heavy drain on the public treasury, and on investment for economic recovery in hard times.

There has been a great deal of mission creep in entitlements. I’ve watched them over the years. And perhaps there are entitlements which are not largesse, but surely that is not the crucial argument here? And certainly the whole notion of how much to transfer from the productive to the non-productive is a more interesting argument than whether a particular statement was made by a Scottish lawyer, or for that matter, by Plato.

On reading the above I seem to have left out something. The “Largesse Canard” is sometimes expanded to include a theory of cycles in government: democracy degenerates into disorder and is usually followed by dictatorship. Tytler is said to have written a great deal about this. http://www.commonsensegovernment.com/article-03-14-09.html

I’m not familiar with Tytler, but the cycles of government were described by Aristotle and were a pretty common notion among classical political philosophers. Cicero was very familiar with them. So were most of the Framers. Again it is irrelevant whether or no a Scots lawyer added to this theory, since it is not likely that he was the primary source of the views of many of the Framers. The notion that democracies end up as dictatorships was hardly new with Tytler, and probably the best discussion of the cyclical nature of government is C Northcote Parkinson’s Evolution of Political Thought, which I used as a textbook for senior political philosophy back in my professor days.

And while it hadn’t happened yet, the French Revolution followed by Napoleon does not seem to contradict the view.

And we have this from one of my right wing friends:

On a cause of corruption in popular governments.

James Chastek had a post last July which may be apropos the business about the public "voting themselves largesse from the public purse." He opens by saying:

After giving a lengthy discourse on the rise and extent of the decadence of popular government (with a focus on the rise of the regulatory state), Jacques Barzun concludes to the formula that the moment when good intentions exceeded the power [of the average reasonable person] to fulfill them marked the onset of decadence. There is evidence in Barzun’s discourse that this moment is very difficult to avoid, and that this formula indicates a way in which popular governments contain the seeds of their own collapse into decadence. So how does this corruption happen?

There is a fundamental desire in popular government to ensure fair play and equal access, and this requires regulation. There nevertheless remains a perpetual genius for a.) extending the scope of what will count as fair play and equal access (the gradual extension of rights) and b.) discovering ways to cut off persons from a fair share and equal access (new modes of fraud, monopoly, or impinging on the ever expanding notion of right). Both give rise to diverse sorts of regulation to ensure justice and punish crime, and the perpetual genius to extend equality or outwit the system lead to more and more regulation. At some point, the good intentions of the regulators amass to the point that no reasonable person can be expected to make his way through the labyrinth of regulation, and at this point the government is no longer a popular government. Thus the very regulations made to ensure the equal ability of everyone to compete amass to where they become an impediment to the ability of persons to compete.

This is not an argument for libertarian deregulation.

The whole essay – it’s fairly short – can be found here: http://thomism.wordpress.com/2011/07/27/on-a-cause-of-corruption-in-popular-governments/

I recall the essay. I suppose the simplest summary is that the road to Hell is paved with good intentions. But then we have much cultural knowledge about that, including folklore dating back to Aesop and before. Those who measure success by intention rather than result will often find unexpected consequences, and some will die condemned as villains no matter their intentions.

Of all sad words, of tongue and pen, the saddest are these: But I meant well.

I also have mail from many pointing out that it is not the middle class who vote themselves largess from the public treasury, but those who are unproductive transfer wealth to themselves (or to all) from the productive. This isn’t strictly true: a number of public benefits including the one that Niven and I often use as an example, bashing down the curbs to make life easier for the disabled, are enthusiastically supported by those who pay the taxes. Aristotle defines the middle class as those who possess the goods of fortune in moderation, and generally when you have government by and of the middle class, it will often boost public benefits, generally to be shared by all. The problem comes when they can no longer be afforded, yet the tax structure is that most to all of the taxes fall on increasingly smaller numbers of people. Those accustomed to the public benefits, yet now cannot pay into the public treasury, still want and generally insist on the public benefits.

Example: Some 70% of American public school children now get a breakfast paid for by the public treasury. This is apparently necessary for some number of the children – I don’t know how many, but numbers claimed run from a few percent to 30%. That is, the children would have no breakfast if the public largesse did not provide it. This is not seen as a responsibility of the parents – let them work, or go to the streets to beg; it’s their job to feed their children – but a public responsibility. One can, and I will, argue that a republic is far better off to allow locals and particularly local charities to address this difficulty. This has the great merit of allowing those temporarily out of work to assume some responsibilities and claim some pride in doing community work without burdening the people in the next county or state with local problems. It is always a good thing for a republic that many of the citizens are involved in working on local problems, rather than entrusting it all to a paid (and increasingly expensive) bureaucracy. But that’s a matter for another essay.  It should be obvious that one requirement of self government is that those who can participate in governing, and at the lowest level possible.

Rule by the middle class is not quite the same thing as populist democracy which at one time was known by the more pejorative name of mob rule. Those who have nothing have every incentive to get something, and if the easiest way to do that is through politics, than that is an attractive course. And as Murray observed in Losing Ground, if you given enough benefits to those in poverty, then poverty becomes an very attractive state to be in.  If I hire people to be poor for a living I will get many applicants; yet it must be paid for by the productive or it cannot be paid for at all.  Incidentally it is no canard to say that Barzun, Murray, and Aristotle said the things I have said they said. They did say them, famously. In Aristotle’s case we have several sources, including Cicero.