Why Does Government Deliver Bad Government?

From “George” comes this friendly suggestion (slightly edited) motivated by Hillary’s Wall Street bribes:

“It is well known that as a government employee, you cannot accept bribes, or gifts from contractors, and the most they would let you get away with is a lunch or dinner under $100.

“So how difficult is it for Congress to pass a law that former government employees cannot charge any fees for speaking? Therefore, all these scum will speak for free or just stay home.”

Not difficult at all, if they wanted to. How difficult is it for Congress to pass any number of laws that would improve government? It’s very easy, if they had a mind to. There must be 100s and 1000s of such measures, even many that libertarians could endorse. No one expects perfect government — that is an impossibility — but Congress evidently doesn’t want to pass even many measures that would improve government. And the $64 question is “Why not?”

The strong tendency of government to deliver bad, rather than good, government is supported by a number of strong girders. These underpinnings are what influence Congress strongly, so that what seems to be easy to do to improve government is not done; and, in fact, the opposite is what is passed.

What are these underpinnings? If you search for explanations of bad government, you will find many of them; but they often do not explain the phenomenon. This is not as easy a problem to analyze as it may seem. We are after understanding and knowledge, not superficial statements. A libertarian might blame it on government’s failure to protect property rights and instead to initiate aggression against citizens. But this only describes the badness; it doesn’t explain why it occurs. Some people will say that government is bad because it’s big and not limited. But why is it big if bigness makes it bad? Some will say that government is bad because it’s not democratic enough, i.e., it caters to special interests. But, again, descriptions of what happens in a bad government, such as dispensing privileges, do not explain why it happens. If government is corrupt and fails at its purported good missions in these and other ways that we see manifested all the time, what factors cause this outcome?

To stimulate independent thought among readers, bloggers, and libertarian experts who may have worthy insights on why we get bad government, I stop here without providing my answers. However, I provided some analysis in some work in my LRC archive such as the latter half of this article. That explains why coercive government can’t be reformed and why it gets worse. That raises the question: Why do we have coercive government? I provided an answer buried in this article. In another article, I blamed “illusions”. This article focused on the inherent failings of coercion by government. Yet more analysis is here. Another attempt at explanation is here. Also, see here, here, and here as well as here.

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7:59 pm on July 30, 2016