Recently in the Wall Street Journal, Dierdre McCloskey reviewed Thieves of State by Sarah Chayes and A Republic No More by Jay Cost and considers the possibility that corruption, rather than being an aberration of behavior among agents of the state, is actually the regular state of things. In other words, perhaps the state in its very essence is a type of corruption. And thus, “corruption” as popularly understood, is not all that bad when it allows for an end run around the “official” state. Ms. McCloskey also invokes Robert Higgs and Murray Rothbard in her analysis:
As any ethical person should today, Mr. Cost rails against the gross inefficiency and inequity of present-day oil subsidies, the Congressional pork barrel, easy-to-game Medicare, and corporate welfare. The tax code, he points out, keep filling up with more ways for companies to shelter revenue from taxes. “Every disinterested observer hates it; nobody can stop it.” An admirer of James Madison’s belief that separation of powers makes for a lasting republic, he concludes that the vaunting progressive ambition to expand the functions of the Federal government, with conservative schemes to feed the military-industrial complex, overwhelmed the antique structure of the Constitution, yielding “A Republic No More.”
If you consider agricultural subsidies, special-interest politics and the revolving door between the legislature and the lobbyist’s firms to be examples of corruption (as Mr. Cost does), “A Republic No More” suggests the United States is now as corrupt now as during the Gilded Age, or the Age of Jackson. Maybe more. Certainly the government is bigger, and every extension brings a fresh opportunity for waste and mismanagement. As Will Rogers used to put it, “Be thankful we’re not getting all the government we pay for.” If Will could see a Federal government directing four times the share of the economy than in 1925, he’d stop laughing.
Both these books are page-turners, if you can handle some 540 pages registering the crimes, follies and misfortunes of humankind. Anyone interested in good government (and bad) would do well to read both. Yet an economist might be inclined to draw a different conclusion from their reporting (and Murray Rothbard and Robert Higgs did so for decades): “Government is a band of robbers into whose clutches we have fallen”—not “thieves of state,” in Ms. Chayes’s way of putting it, but a state of thieves...
Ms. Chayes and Mr. Cost and the neo-institutionalists believe we can enchain the state with “mechanisms.” I doubt it. Adding laws onto an ethically corrupt state will not change much of anything, because the monopoly of violence goes on tempting. The mechanical rules of bribery in Stockholm are probably the same as in Delhi, and the jaywalking rules in Berlin the same as in New York. The difference is ethics. Without ethics no amount of institutional “redesign” would yield the honest government that Swedes have and that American progressives fantasize about.
