Good government

on Oct 06 in Politics tagged by Trevor Hicks

David Brooks articulates very well the central conflict between two competing visions of what constitutes good government. You can go back and read a dozen or more of my articles or this one. This is why Brooks gets paid to write and I do it as a hobby outside of my day job. In the following excerpt, Bentham is the clever technocrat with a plan to solve every problem and Hume is the hands-off guy with a bit of humility about his ability to define the one best way for hundreds of millions of citizens.

The people on Mr. Bentham’s side believe that government can get actively involved in organizing innovation. (I’ve taken his proposals from the Waxman-Markey energy bill and the Baucus health care bill.)

The people on Mr. Hume’s side believe government should actively tilt the playing field to promote social goods and set off decentralized networks of reform, but they don’t think government knows enough to intimately organize dynamic innovation.

So let’s have the debate. But before we do, let’s understand that Mr. Bentham is going to win. The lobbyists love Bentham’s intricacies and his stacks of spending proposals, which they need in order to advance their agendas. If you want to pass anything through Congress, Bentham’s your man.

And I think Brooks is right at the end, the Benthamite way is just far too lucrative for big corporate interests to imagine it going away.