Magic Wand Government and the Abdication of Agency

With the financial crisis looming, coupled with projected crises in Social Security and Healthcare, many Americans are looking to the federal government to provide solutions. They see the government as holding a magic wand that can fix things without cost. However, there are two key problems with this idea. First it promotes the idea that there are quick and costless solutions to political problems. Second, and more importantly, it presupposes that there are even solutions that are worth attaining.

We have already borne the consequences of the government’s ‘solution’ of the financial crisis. Bailing out the corporations and banks responsible for creating the artificial credit crisis, with taxpayer money; the only safeguard being the promise that it would be returned once the economy rebounds. What was the result: higher stock sell-offs and record lows on Wall Street. The costs for bad investment are being absorbed by the tax payer, especially those that made smart investment decisions and are weathering the crisis. There is no tax credit for those that are keeping the economy afloat by smart investment, but instead they are being asked to bailout both those who invested poorly and those who facilitated them. One can imagine the costs associated with government solutions for Social Security and Healthcare.

What is a solution? Does politics offer solutions? Should it? Politics is not math. One cannot apply a logical theorem to settle a dispute between liberty and equality. The very notion of a solution presupposes a right answer. Are our politicians privy to the word of God, or the Platonic form of Good such that they can know the correct solution to adjusting tax brackets? Is there a correct way to maintain economic liberty while maintain economic equality? Is there a way that a government can solve all, if any, of the problems that they propose to solve? More dangerously however, is the very idea of a solution. The French philosopher Bertrand de Jouvenel stresses “the dangerous consequences of regarding political problems as implying solutions which should compel our assent with ‘the irresistible force of self-evidence.’” One can recall Hitler’s “Final Solution” to solve the decline of the German state. One can recall the solution of racial tensions during the civil rights movement. One can recall the inherent failure of every political solution. Why is that? Because there is no solution to political problems, only compromise.

What then is the arena of politics? It is a contestation, a struggle, but there is no absolute victor. In the end, the only way to address political problems, without the resort to force, is through settlements and compromise. But is there something else? Can any change be achieved?

A third effect of magic wand government is that it is disempowering. It is a way for people to throw away their own responsibilities. Human beings become disciplined and docile with every new government program to solve an inconvenience. Social Security takes care of our need to save for retirement, universal healthcare takes away our need to take care of our bodies, and the list goes on. We are abdicating all of our power as individuals, as subjects, as agents. Instead of donating money and volunteering to help the poor, we want the government to do it for us. Instead of managing our money wisely, we want the government to do it for us. We have created a sense of powerlessness in politics. We cannot achieve anything as individuals and communities, but the government has infinite power. In doing so, we lose our own faith in ourselves and become completely dependent on institutions that have empirically failed.

In this election, we must be wary not to fall into the snares offered by political solutions. We must not ignore the costs and risks associated with them. The solution lies within our own agency, in our own ability to change the world.