A Little More Anarchy, Please
Marooned by his shipmates in the land of the Houynhnms, Captain Gulliver found a remarkable civilization. Its art and language induced not institutions but felicity. The Houynhnms had no word for lies (or for lawyers). And they had no government. Instead, they convened a council every four years, with a single purpose: to determine where there was surplus and where there was need. The one was immediately remedied by the other, and the council was then adjourned.
Easy for them, you say. They didn't have, after all, a Postal Service or an Office of Management of the Budget, let alone a Presidential Commission on Privacy. (Mull that one over, you collectors of oxymoron.) We face these complexities, you say, because we live in a complex world. Regulation makes orderly our diverse activities.
Perhaps. But that is a societal view. Institutions have societal views. People should have people's views. Do we not feel, each of us, that there must be some end to this civic buttinsky-ness, which fills up newsprint like white sales?
Consider the possibility that a bit more anarchy in our temperament would help. Anarchy, that is, in its etymologic sense of being without a ruler, not in its popular sense of lacking order. Indeed, its virtues are the opposite of the popular meaning: for the true anarchist believes — sadly, he usually finds out — that reason and nature are sufficient to show reasonable animals what to do and what to avoid.
List-makers often name government as a distinguishing characteristic of mankind, along with history and the transverse thumb. (The human is also the only species with group term insurance or Saranwrap, though they are rarely included.) It is unclear whether his invention of government is named in man's favor or in his ridicule.
Clearly, we don't think of the absence of government as a weakness in other breeds. It is hard to imagine tapirs, say, debating the allotment of grazing rights, or a congress of giraffes. As government grows, the ranks of those who look upon it as a proud device shrink. But loss of admiration doesn't slow it down.
Our traditional measure of governmental excess is money. The federal budget to operate 41 regulatory agencies this year is $4.8 billion, up 115 per cent in five years. And that is only one side of a dear coin: industry estimates it will spend $134.8 billion next year merely to comply with the rules set down. Cost alone need not upset us. After all, what are vices for if not to indulge ourselves? True, few of us would choose the vice of government for our profligacy. Unlike most of our private pastimes, it numbs the senses without any redeeming titillation.
The only sure progeny of rules is more rules. Regulating production eventually calls for regulating demand. When we decide that electrostatic scrubbers are needed on cement factory smokestacks, watch for the result on the price of bagged cement. The increased price has been adduced, not by demand, but by an extra-market force. Buyers must now find more dollars to chase the same bag of cement, so they will increase the price of their own product. The market will soon be regulated to adjust for the resulting inflation.
Adjust for, not cure. Inflation seems to be immune from regulatory cure. The anarchist's First Law of Public Administration is that the effectiveness of regulation bears an inverse ratio to the importance of the task at hand. Thus, rules for the density of alpaca fur will be scrupulously obeyed while inflation and inefficiency remain as elusive as a hummingbird.
Would examples help? The view that we can regulate our way to bliss has been raised to allegory by that most active of deputations, the Federal Trade Commission. That agency has recently commenced hearings, with the attendant hoopla, into misleading photographs in advertising. That agency has one procedure defining when a free offer is free, and one for mail order houses as complex as the requirements for the 32nd Masonic Degree.
No one seriously believes television advertising. Ask your kids. No one believes that if you say something is free, you won't try to get them to pay for it sooner or later. We're not that stupid. And though, as Disraeli insists, representative government may be a drollery, our representatives don't think we're that stupid, either.
What, then, is the rub? Why does it get so out of hand? Those in government come by vocation to believe there is a cure for every ague. By putting legislators where they are, out of harm's way and reality's traffic, we encourage them to convert that view (which everyone privately recognizes as twattle) into statutory action. If there is poverty, we outlaw it. If there is racial or sexual discrimination, we mandate that there be equality. All well and good. But only a few of our discomforts are political. People do not leap from bridges in despair over the gross national product, the SALT talks, or the growth in currency in relation to M2.
The Federal Trade Commission would like people not to be misled, by the beauty and grace of television models, into thinking that life has that in store for everyone. The Federal Trade Commission should drink some warm milk and lie down. People will only be misled by what they want to believe. Each of us needs some fantasy in his life. If some of us are too gullible for another's liking, so be it. Let us stop looking to rules, lawyers, bureaus, and courts to solve what are not problems but elements in the nature of the beast. There is no law, whether appended to yet another civil rights bill or to the Constitution itself, that will slake that nameless anxiety with which some of us confront the ceiling at four in the morning.
We cannot get rid of a government that constantly badgers us unless we're willing first, to be left alone, and second, to stop pestering others. Leaving each other alone seems to be harder than it sounds. If we restricted our contacts to affairs of health, curiosity, commerce, and love, each of us would have sufficient energies left over to read Gibbon or build a lighter-than-air machine.
Anarchy has gotten a bad name. Put aside your visions of mustachioed men in dandruff-flaked suits sullenly blowing up trains. Anarchy in its most benign state is the grasp that democracy, irreplaceable as it is, is simply the disposition of more people than not, and the protection of the rest. We should not infer that the majority view is right, true, or even sensible. It is simply what is to be done until we change our minds.
A bit of anarchy helps keep that in mind. It does more. It encourages a suspicion of nations, professions, communities, and dogma, and an indulgent prejudice in favor of the individual, that hapless soul who remains the only unit in our society to think a thought or sing a song.
Bruce Ducker practices parables and law in Denver.
