From School Cupcake Bans to Ferguson to Iraq: George Will’s Unified Field Theory of Contempt for Govt

In his

Washington Post column, George Will offers up “The Cupcake
Postulate,” a unified field theory of out-of-control
government:

Washington’s response to the menace of school bake sales illustrates
progressivism’s ratchet: The federal government subsidizes school
lunches, so it must control the lunches’
contents, which validates regulation of what it
calls “competitive foods,” such as vending machine snacks. Hence
the need to close the bake sale loophole, through which sugary
cupcakes might sneak: Foods sold at fundraising bake sales must,
with some exceptions, conform to federal standards.

What has this to do with police, from Ferguson, Mo., to your home
town, toting marksman rifles,
fighting knives, grenade launchers and other combat gear? Swollen
government has a shriveled brain: By printing and borrowing money,
government avoids thinking about its proper scope and actual
competence. So it smears mine-resistant armored vehicles and other
military marvels across 435 congressional
districts because it can.

And instead of making immigration policy serve the nation’s
values and workforce needs, government, egged on by conservatives,
aspires to emulate East Germany along the Rio Grande, spending
scores of billions to militarize a
border bristling with hardware bought with previous scores
of billions. Much of this is justified by the United States’
longest losing “war,” the one on drugs. Is it, however, necessary
for NASA to have its own SWAT team?…

Contempt for government cannot be hermetically sealed; it seeps
into everything. Which is why cupcake regulations
have foreign policy consequences. Americans, inundated with
evidence that government is becoming dumber and more presumptuous,
think it cannot be trusted to decipher foreign problems and apply
force intelligently.

Read the whole thing.

Hat tip: Marian Tupy of the excellent
HumanProgress site.

Most (if not all) of the examples of stupid government in Will’s
column have already been discussed and reported on here at
Reason.com.

He’s right that confidence in government is
plummeting mostly because of the simultaneously stupid and
overreaching actions of politicians, administrators, and
bureaucrats at all levels. Recognizing such a reality may be the
beginning of (libertarian) wisdom, but as I’ve written before, it
also carries a very serious potential risk. Counterintuitively,
distrust in government may lead to calls for more
government. Consider

the 2010 paper “Regulation
and Distrust,” written by Philippe Aghion, Yann Algan,
Pierre Cahuc, and Andrei Shleifer and published in The
Quarterly Journal of Economics. Drawing on World Values Survey
data from the past several decades for over 50 countries, the
authors help explain what they call “one of the central puzzles in
research on political beliefs: Why do people in countries with bad
governments want more government intervention?”

The authors make a distinction between “high-trust” and
“low-trust” countries. In the former, most people have positive
feelings about business and government and the general level of
regulation is relatively low. In “low-trust countries,” the
opposite is true and citizens “support government regulation, fully
recognizing that such regulation leads to corruption.” As an
example, they point to differing attitudes toward
government-mandated wages in former socialist countries that
transitioned to market economies. “Approximately 92 percent of
Russians and 82 percent of East Germans favor wage control,” they
write, naming two low-trust populations. In Scandinavia, Great
Britain, and North American countries, where there are higher
levels of trust in the public and private sectors, less than half
the population does. As a final kicker, Aghion et al. suggest that
increased regulation sows yet more distrust, which in turn
engenders more regulation….

It turns out that government may be growing not in
spite of our confidence in it,
but because of our lack of confidence in it
to  This self-defeating spiral will only get worse if the
United States fails to stem its slide toward being a low-trust
country. The first step should entail the government and
politicians recognizing that they’ve got a problem. As with any
rehab plan, it would do the government—and the rest of us—well to
start small and take it one day at a time.

Read the whole thing.

A major ray of hope—indeed, the beam of sunshine that’s warming
up this libertarian moment—is really the ways in which people are
creating workarounds that simply bypass government whenever
possible. Taxi regulations screw consumers? Create Uber.
Public-school educators are unresponsive? Create your own
curriculum or even your own school. Can’t sell unpasteurized milk
products? Create a buyers club. Major parties won’t listen? Create
the Tea Party. And on and on.

As Matt Welch and I discussed at length in
The Declaration of Independents, workarounds are a great
thing and easier to pull off than ever, but they have serious
limitations (witness foreign policy, Ferguson, the drug war, and so
much more). It’s well past time that we start insisting on a
limited, trustworthy government that is actually competent and
restrained at the few things that it should be doing. That will not
only reduce the desire for more government, it will free up even
more time and resources for the free-range experiments in living
that will actually make the world better, more interesting, and
more prosperous.

Last fall, Matt Welch and I talked with George Will about his
“libertarian evolution.” Watch now: