Copyright © 1998 by Paul F. deLespinasse, Adrian College
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"... the purpose of a large part of modern law is the elimination of unfair or unequal disparities among citizens. But hyperlexis works squarely against that objective. In a highly regulated environment of intricate restrictions, those best able to survive are those who are able to hire the new class of form-filling consultants--experts (mainly but not exclusively lawyers) who can invoke rules on behalf of their clients and pick their way among the bramble bushes. Such trained talent is rare and expensive; inevitably it will largely be consumed by those persons and organized groups that are best able to pay. Though everyone suffers from hyperlexis, the small are injured more than the great."
Bayless Manning
We now turn from the easiest question of political philosophy to perhaps the hardest. The fact that government is an involuntary association, the nature of law as a general rule of action, and unavoidable questions otherwise insoluble all make it clear that an ideal government must be universal. (The great difficulty of actually getting such a universal government is a practical rather than a philosophical problem. See chapter 9.) It is much harder to reach firm conclusions regarding the scope of the activities that the universal government should undertake.
The extent of a government's jurisdiction is one matter and the extent of its activities within that jurisdiction is another matter. A universal government could be a minimal one, enacting and enforcing few laws and expending few resources. Military defense needs have commonly led to expanding government authority, size, and expense. A universal government which minimizes the need to maintain a large military establishment would be the most plausible of all candidates for minimacy. However we cannot just assume that government ought to be minimal, and even if we did it would still be necessary to determine just what amount of government activity is minimal.
Support for minimizing government activity is not presently widespread. This, of course, is not an argument on the merits, since there is also little support for universal government and yet we have seen that universality is clearly desirable. But current public opinion does suggest that our main problem may be contending with people inclined to the other extreme possibility--the maximal state.
No one actually comes right out and says that government activity, size, and expenditures should be maximized. That is only the implication of their actual position, which is that whenever there is something bad in the world, government ought to do something about it. Since there is (and always will be!) a great profusion of bad things, this attitude is an invitation for government to expand its scope until some natural limit kicks in.
Natural limits to the scope of government activity clearly do exist. No government could spend more than the gross world product or employ more than the total working population! There has got to be some people engaged in the production of goods and services before the surpluses of basic necessities exist which allow the luxury of a large governmental bureaucracy. As the spectacular failure of the Communist experiments indicates, governments cannot replace the private sector in the production of basic material necessities. There is a definite limit to the gravy-train ratio, the ratio between government workers and the number of private sector workers whose taxes are available to pay their salaries. We may not know just where that limit is, but we can be sure that it exists.
Natural limits on growth usually work in very unpleasant ways. The natural limits on population growth, for example, manifest themselves in squalor, poverty, malnutrition, starvation, and famine (starvation on a large scale). The limits may also show up in the form of war or other violent methods of acquiring increasingly scarce resources. Population may also be held down by epidemics brought on by the malnutrition, by war, or by an increase in individual misconduct beyond some critical point. (Not all natural limits on population are environmental.) If we allow government to approach its own natural limits, the results are likely to be equally painful.
We can assume that there is a "golden mean" for the scope of government activity: neither too much, nor too little, but rather just the right amount of such activity, size, and expenditure of resources. In the following pages we will try to identify roughly where this golden mean lies. As future circumstances change, however, they will likely have implications for the location of this golden mean even if we can identify its current location. In all likelihood, today's governments govern both too much (in some respects) and too little (in other respects). That they govern too little may be in part due to the absence of a world regime and to the fact that there are some kinds of things independent national governments cannot do.
Putting to one side for the moment the larger question of how much government there should be, how much world government would be optimal? Whatever the proper level of activity for government in general, how much of that activity should be conducted by the world government and how much by lower levels?
At least initially, the world government will have to be a federal one, with some responsibilities allocated to the center and others left to the governments of the various constituent units. Ideally, the central government will be created by drafting and ratifyhing a world constitution. The historical precedent would be the formation of the United States in 1787-1789. The needed support in the constituent units would preclude simply wiping out their governments. Too many national officials would be injured by abolishing the little puddles in which they are big frogs, and their combined opposition would ensure the defeat of the proposed world constitution. Rather than abolishing national governments, we can realistically hope only to reduce their independence.
Even if the world government is created, to take the other extreme possibility, by forced unification of the constituent units around a single militarily dominant unit, it would still have to be federal to have any chance of working and enduring. The notable modern example of forced unification, that of 19th century Germany, recognized this fact. Even today Germany remains a federal rather than a unitary republic.
Allocation of responsibilities between the central government and its constituent units is not a matter of deciding where supremacy lies. Either the central government is supreme, or it is not a government at all. When there is conflict over the distribution of governing authority, an organ of the world government must decide the issue. Such decisions will by no means always favor the central authorities, but the decisions themselves must come from a central authority such as the world supreme court.
The key clause in the U.S. Constitution from this point of view is the Supremacy Clause, Article VI:
"This Constitution, and the laws of the United States which shall be made in pursuance thereof, and all treaties made, or which shall be made, under the authority of the United States, shall be the supreme law of the land; and the judges in every state shall be bound thereby, anything in the constitution or laws of any state to the contrary notwithstanding."
When the South acted in defiance of these plain words, the Civil War resulted.
The U.S.S.R. Constitutions of 1936 and 1977 unwisely contained language virtually the direct opposite of the U.S. Supremacy Clause:
Article 17 (1936): The right shall be preserved for each Union Republic freely to secede from the U.S.S.R.Article 72 (1977): Each Union Republic shall retain the right freely to secede from the U.S.S.R.
Until the late 1980s this language did not matter. The Soviet Constitutions were not law enforceable in the courts. They had little relationship to reality. With Gorbachev's drive for glasnost, the rule of law, and democracy, however, the mischievous implications of this language immediately became self-evident. Efforts to remove the secession clause produced an uproar and had to be dropped. Shortly thereafter, the Soviet Union self-estructed in an orgy of secessions. We need to take this lesson very seriously.
A world government must be supreme in the sense that its laws, unless they are unconstitutional, take precedence over those of its constituent units. There can be no claims that the constituent units are "sovereign," there can be no right to secede, there can be no local right to supercede the laws of the central government. And an organ of the central government must resolve jurisdictional conflicts between constituent units or between constituent units and the central government. Given all of this, however, it would be extremely unwise for the world government to do more than the minimum, to do more than the things which not only have to be done, but have to be done by the central government if they are going to be done successfully at all.
There is a natural tendency for governments to expand their size, activities, and expenditures whenever the environment gives them the opportunity. The governmental power of the sword gives it the ability to secure more and more resources. The desire of individual officials to increase their power and influence provides a motive. As long as government is not universal, the disadvantages produced by excessive government limit how much expansion can occur. Countries that overdo go belly-up. But for the same reasons that a universal government can successfully regulate multinational corporations whereas merely national governments cannot, a universal government would not be prevented from unwise expansion of its activities. It therefore behooves constituents of a world government to try to restrain it in every possible way.
If needful action can be taken by lower levels of government,the world government should keep its nose out of it. This will produce several benefits. It will allow for variety in the world, variety which can reflect local differences in tastes, in values, in cultures. It will avoid trying to force all of life everywhere into a single mold. It will allow for useful experimentation with different ways of dealing with the same problems. New approaches may turn out disastrously and it is better to mess up one country than to wreck the entire planet. Good approaches are more likely to emerge if several things are tried in different places and their results (costs and benefits) systematically compared. .
Striking the proper balance between the world government and its constituent units will not be easy. Ultimately, the balance may be set at the point which maximizes political support for the world government. Excessive centralization might require central government decisions about matters where any uniform policy would provoke extreme resentment in one part of the world or another. But power to make different rules for different parts of the world is a power that cannot safely be conferred on any government. Some decisions are therefore best left to national or lower levels of government, which can variously comply with the requirements of the rule of law by enacting laws which are uniform within their own jurisdictions. No principle requires the laws of the constituent units in a federation to be identical.
But decentralization itself can be overdone. Today's world, with no world government, is just the extreme case. If there is too much power in the hands of the national governments and not enough in the world government, some of the national governments might secede. But if this happens there is no longer a universal government. Measures to prevent secession must be a very high priority of any world government.
A separate but related issue is how much of an administrative bureaucracy a world government should have. The upper limit here would depend on the (logically) prior decision about how much of the total power exercised by some government will be exercised by the world government. The world government would not require a bureaucracy larger than that needed to fulfil directly the responsibilities allocated to it.
The lower limit on the world government apparatus is not so easily defined. But it is undoubtedly a much more important issue than the upper limit, since it appears that it will be very desirable to minimize the size of the world administrative bureaucracy.
True, having a large number of officials directly employed by the universal government would have some advantages. Positions in the world bureaucracy could be attractive career opportunities for ambitious national leaders from around the world. Top positions could be used as bait in a patronage system which promotes political support for the central government. The larger the central apparatus and the more resources it directly controls, the harder it will be to mobilize secession movements. (The American Social Security system may be one of the most powerful obstacles to secession movements in the modern U.S. Politicians who even suggest slowing the increase in benefits become instant lame ducks. Proposals to secede from the union and thereby lose all Social Security benefits for residents of a state would probably evoke lynch mobs of outraged AARP members.)
But the dangers of a large and powerful bureaucracy, especially in a universal government with few natural limits on its aggrandizement and expansion, are very considerable. Every effort should be made to minimize the world government's administrative apparatus. Fortunately, there are ways that the extensive responsibilities of a universal regime can be handled by a very limited staff.
When a government seeks to do something, it has two basic options. It can hire people, place them on the government payroll, and have them do the necessary work "in house." In the United States, for example, air traffic controllers are employed directly by the federal government. The other option is for the government to contract with some other organization which can provide the goods or services desired by the government. The individuals who do the actual work are employed by the contracting organization, not by the government.
Both approaches involve government as a party to voluntary associations, government-as-contractor. When the work is done in-house, the government operates as a retail contractor, making a large number of small contracts with each of its civil servants employed to do the work. When the work is done by other organizations, the government is a wholesale contractor, making a few large contracts with the organizations which do the work. A certain amount of administrative organization is necessary in order to determine the work to be done, advertise for bids, award the contracts, and monitor compliance. But this will require a much smaller bureaucracy than would be needed to do all of the work in- house.
There are two types of organization to which the world government could contract out execution of its responsibilities: private corporations, and lower units of government. In the United States, the last generation has brought a vast increase in wholesale government contracting with both types of organization. Defense contractors and private universities have received huge sums. A contract for a weapons system may be worth billions of dollars. Elements of the system used to send Americans to the moon were developed by private corporations under contract with the NASA.
Likewise, many federal programs in the U.S. are administered by state governments. The federal government has agreed to pay a certain percentage (in some cases 100%) of the costs of a state program provided that the state comply with rules and guidelines set down by the central authorities. "Grant-in-aid" programs appeal to state and local officials. These programs allow them to reap the popularity gained by spending money without simultaneously incurring the wrath caused by imposing taxes to pay for it all. A universal government could use the same strategy to bolster cooperation with national officials and further its own policy goals while avoiding the growth of a large and possibly troublesome world bureaucracy.
The power of a central government bureaucracy can also be reduced by decentralizing authority to decide who will receive government funds for providing given services. The American G.I. Bill, for example, after World War II financed college educations for returning veterans but allowed the soldiers to pick their own schools. More recently it has been proposed to finance primary and secondary education through a voucher system. Parents would receive yearly certificates from government which could be redeemed for a certain amount of cash by any school--public or private--attended by their children. The system would break the near monopoly presently held by the public schools, since they would get only the same per-student subsidy that private schools get. Proponents argue that the resulting public-private competition would increase parents' liberty to pick the best school for their children. It would certainly decentralize power since it would combine public financing of education with individual decisions allocating the money.
It is questionable whether the world government ought to have anything to do with education. But those who shape such a government should consider using voucher systems for allocating whatever subsidies the government does establish. The alternative system where government officials determine which specific organizations will be subsidized concentrates power unnecessarily, and unnecessary concentrations of power should always be avoided.
Great care must be taken to avoid the danger of praetorianism, of a central government which is controlled by those who nominally work for it. It goes without saying that the military must be given no opportunity to seize power in a coup d'etat. But arrogation of the supreme power by civil servants is equally intolerable. The world government bureaucracy must be subject to the decisions of elected officials, not vice versa, and no terminology such as "participatory democracy" must be allowed to confuse this issue. To allow a decision by employees of a government department, no matter how "democratically" the decision was made inside that department, to supercede the decisions of the elected representatives of the people would be the antithesis of genuine democracy.
In considering the proper scope of the world government, the extent to which today's national governments appear to be doing too much, and likewise the extent to which they are doing too little, may be instructive. Some of these excesses and deficiencies may simply reflect the fact that national governments are not universal. Others, however, are by no means inevitable even under present conditions.
The most obvious example of excessive government activity today lies in the military field. Huge national armies devouring outrageous amounts of resources, human time and talent, are the hallmark of our age. The military outlays of the United States and other major countries combined with those of the remaining 160 or so members of the United Nations, come to a very substantial percentage of the gross world product. And yet the existence of the various armies produces mainly a standoff indistinguishable, except in its great expense, from a similar standoff which might be achieved at much lower cost if all parties could agree to cut back on such expenditures.
The excess resources devoted to the various national military establishments may well be a necessary consequence of the present world anarchy. A universal government could authoritatively resolve conflicts which today can be decided, in extreme cases, only by war. It would also make national borders less important and therefore less worth fighting over. It would provide an environment in which national military forces could be reduced to an absolute minimum, if not indeed totally eliminated.
A world government, however, could not abolish military forces entirely. Military forces have always served two functions, and only one of these functions would disappear under a world government. Defense against attack from abroad would no longer be necessary when there is no more "abroad." But a small military force would still be needed to perform the remaining function. .
Limited resistance by a few individuals or small groups of individuals to the jurisdiction of a government can be crushed by means of law. General rules of action can be enacted and those convicted of violating them can be deprived of property, liberty, or even life. Clearly, law must be the preferred means of defending government's jurisdiction. Punishments are applied to specific individuals who violated a general rule; there is a direct connection between an individual's behavior and government's treatment of that individual. People can avoid sanctions by complying with the laws. Since laws must be in the form of general rules of action, they will not place outrageous demands on anybody.
But government can protect its jurisdiction by laws only under good conditions. There is no way to guarantee that conditions will always be good. Organized resistance may swell beyond the ability of law to deal with it. Government then no longer enjoys the option of governing solely via laws. The only choice remaining is to capitulate to secession or to employ military force to put down the organized resistance to government's authority. If, as we have been arguing, good government must be universal, then capitulation to secession is ruled out.
Some military forces will therefore be a necessary part of any successful universal government. This is a regrettable fact which must be faced squarely by any adequate political philosophy. Employment of military force to prevent secession is clearly undesirable as long as law can do the job. Military force cannot be targeted solely to people who deserve it because of their actions. Modern weapons are very undiscriminating; "smart bombs" are not smart enough! But the basic duty of government is to govern. If groups of citizens make it impossible for the universal government to govern solely by means of law, responsibility for government's need to resort to military force rests on these people.
It is perfectly proper and perhaps morally obligatory for citizens to resist improper government actions such as pseudolaws. We will discuss possible forms of citizen resistance in chapter 10. But it is never proper to resist government jurisdiction. The remedy sought must always be to change government's behavior, not to destroy it or to reduce its universal jurisdiction.
A second major example of excessive government activity can be found in the regulation of crime. At a time when crime statistics in many countries have been skyrocketing, it might appear that government anti-crime activities have been insufficient, not excessive. But there are multiple dimensions to this issue. Insufficient anti-crime efforts along some lines do not preclude the possibility of too much activity in other dimensions.
The basic problem, and herein lies much food for thought for future world leaders, has been the effort to outlaw an unduly broad range of activities. Political philosophers have long realized that too many laws can be very dangerous. St. Thomas Aquinas, for example, pointed out that the side effects of trying to outlaw all sins may be worse than the benefits. Government has only limited law enforcement resources and can easily spread itself too thin. It must therefore concentrate on preventing those actions which destroy all possibility of civilization and of human fellowship rather than squandering its scarce enforcement resources on secondary (though admittedly important) problems.
There are three kinds of actions which should not be outlawed but which have in fact sometimes been prohibited. The first consists of actions which are positively virtuous and generally beneficial in their consequences. Striking examples can be found in the Soviet experiment from 1917 to 1991. Rules against speculation (buying goods for the purpose of making a profit upon resale) and against private entrepreneurship produced disastrous results. Other examples, not limited to the socialist countries, include tariffs and other obstacles to free trade, price control "laws," and all government decisions arbitrarily awarding monopoly powers to private organizations or to government itself.
The second type of actions which should not be outlawed consists of those which are inherently immoral but which may be the best action available to people under the prevailing circumstances. A possible example might be abortions. Recent public discussions have been little better than shouting matches between those who feel that abortions are immoral and should therefore be illegal and those who think that abortions are not immoral and therefore should not be illegal. These camps, however, are not the only possible positions on abortion, as the following table shows.
Immoral Not immoral
Should be 1.major camp 2.
illegal
Should not
be illegal 3. 4.major camp
Few would opt for position (2) that abortion is not immoral but should be illegal anyway. Position (3), however, deserves serious consideration. It maintains that abortion is immoral, but should not be illegal. Although inherently immoral, an action may be good in the sense that the alternatives available under the circumstances are all worse. This may well be the case with abortion. In today's very unfortunate circumstances, for example, laws against abortion might produce an increased total amount of evil and a further deterioration in circumstances. Sexual promiscuity and illegitimate births are rampant. If not for the many abortions currently performed--often outnumbering live births- -a higher and higher percentage of children would be brought up in outrageous conditions. Already intolerable pressures on the welfare, schooling, and law enforcement systems would be increased.
An additional reason outlawing abortions might be very inadvisable is that the universal government may have to regulate reproduction to keep population from putting catastrophic pressure on the environment. Mandatory abortions might be a key part of any such regulation. It would be unseemly to outlaw an action which may be commanded by the government. We will return to this question in more detail later.
Thirdly, even unambiguously evil actions should not be outlawed if the effort to make them illegal produces a greater evil. A probable example of this class of actions is the use of various kinds of drugs. A universal regime must be particularly cautious about enacting anti-drug laws in any event, since the wide variety of cultures included in such a regime would display widely differing attitudes and practices with regard to various drugs. One need only point to the gulf separating Scandinavian or Russian from Islamic fundamentalist attitudes towards the consumption of alcohol. Efforts to enforce uniform world-wide rules on such matters would be extremely foolish.
Even at the strictly national level, where there may be a narrower range of attitudes, prospects for successfully outlawing drug use are not good. The growth of organized crime during the American prohibition experiment suggests the social costs such prohibitions may produce. It is generally understood that the late twentieth century U.S. crime wave was in large part due to the illegality of drugs. Enforcement efforts contained the seeds of their own failure. When police managed to reduce the drug supply, the market price of drugs went up. The increased price stimulated crime in three different ways. First, people desperate for the large amounts of money needed to buy drugs turned to robbery and burglary. Second, the high market price of drugs attracted more people into becoming drug dealers. Third, the large profits resulting from the high price produced a dramatic increase in the murder rate thanks to "turf wars" between competing drug dealers. To the extent that those killed were other drug dealers, they may have been no great loss to the community. Unfortunately, contending drug dealers were not always good shots and they killed many innocent people accidentally. No proposals were heard to provide free shooting lessons at public expense for drug dealers.
Suggestions that drug laws be repealed always evoke the objection that decriminalization might lead to an increase in their use. If drugs were legal, their market price would fall dramatically. At the lower prices, quantity demanded would increase, and use would increase. Thus, the damage done by use of drugs would increase.
One might question the extent to which drug use would increase under such circumstances. If the elasticity of the demand for drugs is very low, a large decrease in price would produce only a small increase in use. Perhaps drug dealers would not be as industrious in getting their "friends" hooked on drugs if the profits to be gained were relatively small, which they would be if drugs were legalized.
Let us assume, however, for discussion purposes, that decriminalizing drugs would in fact produce a substantial increase in their use. It does not automatically follow from this fact that repealing drug laws would be a bad idea. There are two kinds of injuries presently associated with drugs. The fact that repealing the laws would increase one of these problems says nothing about the net effects. It is the overall consequences of an action which we should consider in deciding how to act, not just some of the consequences. This is virtually an axiom in political analysis, since actions usually produce both benefits and costs. Thus the mere fact that a proposed action will produce benefits does not mean it is a good idea. The benefits may be pathetically small compared to the costs. Likewise, the fact that a proposed action will produce some costs or do some harm is insufficient grounds for rejecting that action out of hand. The real questions to be answered are: 1) what is the cost-benefit ratio, and 2) is there an action which could produce the same benefits at lower cost?
The two problems connected with drugs are: 1) the physical and psychological damage done to users and to people closely associated with them, and 2) the social damage resulting from efforts to outlaw their use. Both problems are very serious. For present purposes, though, the important thing is that these two problems are reciprocally related to each other. Actions which decrease one of the problems increase the other, and vice versa. This is a dilemma. It means there are no happy answers here, and the best we can do is to decide on priorities. Which of the two problems associated with drugs is the more serious and fundamental? An answer to this question will clarify the general nature of appropriate action. If the damage done to individuals by drug use is the greater evil, then we must try to exterminate the drug trade by all available means. The Malaysian-Iranian technique of hanging all drug dealers, even small-time ones, might have a chilling effect on the trade. Execution of everybody convicted of using drugs might also have to be considered. If on the other hand it is the social damage caused by efforts to outlaw certain drugs that is most important, repealing the laws against drugs might be the appropriate course.
It appears to me that the social damage caused by efforts to outlaw drugs is more serious than the personal damage caused by using them. Social damage includes the private crime and violence resulting from the illegality of the drugs and their consequent high prices. It includes the corruption of police and other enforcement officials by wealthy drug dealers seeking immunity from prosecution. It includes the costs of incarcerating huge numbers of people: the dollar costs of trying and holding them, and the damage thereby done to people of weak moral fiber when they are put into sustained intimate contact with similar people in schools of hatred and crime. The danger of being the victim of violent crime cannot easily be evaded and is inflicted primarily on elements of the population which are poorest and least able to protect themselves.
The principal damage caused by actual use of drugs, on the other hand, is to the individual users themselves. Anybody who wishes to do so can protect themselves against this kind of damage by not using drugs. Everything else being equal, the personal damage incurred is not a social problem. Society need not inflict great damage on itself in order to prevent individuals from shooting themselves in the foot. Laws must concentrate on regulating individual actions which can damage the general welfare.
Unfortunately, things are not quite as simple as the above paragraph might make it seem. There are other individuals whose welfare is damaged by the drug-users' actions. The most dramatic example is fetuses exposed to drugs by the actions of the women who are carrying them, but there are also the children abused by parental drug-users, there are spouses, and there are other intimate associates. Since the adult associates of drug users are free to disassociate themselves, the real complication here is the children. Possible approaches to dealing with the problem posed by children range from removing them from their parents to socially washing our hands and deciding that all possible government actions will only make things worse. At any rate, it is not clear that the predicament of children, already horrendous, would be increased by decriminalizing drugs.
One way in which legalizing drugs might increase general third party or social costs must be squarely faced. If medical or other treatment incurred because an individual has "shot himself in the foot" is paid for by insurance or by welfare money, this increases everybody's insurance bills or taxes. This brings us to a third area where present governments arguably are doing too much, welfare programs. We now turn to the questions posed by such programs, and especially to their implications for a universal government.
Even in a rich country like the United States many people find themselves in desperate poverty. Some people are destitute because of their own behavior, but there are also plenty of truly innocent victims. Some people's affairs are so messed up that no one can do anything to help, but often some improvement in the immediate problem can be gotten if sufficient resources are expended.
There are three kinds of poverty, each having somewhat different implications for public policy. First there is the poverty which results from unemployment. Some people cannot get a job because their productivity is negative (they actually set back accomplishment of the goals for which they might have been hired). But most people are able to do something which has value in the market, so that other people are willing and able to pay them something for doing it. However as long as rules prohibit employing people for less than some government-enforced "minimum," low productivity people will be unemployable, as Dewey Larson put it, not as a matter of fact but as a matter of law. They will receive the actual minimum, which is nothing, rather than the hypothetical legal minimum, since no one has any duty to hire them.
As chapter 5 indicated, the solution to the poverty associated with unemployment is to repeal all rules against paying low wages. Such rules are, in any event, pseudolaws rather than law and as such have no place in any civilized society.
The second kind of poverty exists when the market value of the labor of some employed people is insufficient to bring them and their dependents up to the minimum standard of living considered socially acceptable. To the extent that unemployment poverty has been eliminated, this second kind of poverty will increase. It is already a very important problem today.
The first and second types of poverty would be reduced, conceivably even eliminated, if all natural resources were publicly-owned and their net rental value distributed equally via a social dividend. (Chapter 4.) The dividend could conceivably be high enough to lift even unemployed people above the minimum socially acceptable standard of living. Some people might then prefer the extra leisure to the extra income from working. They would not be unemployed in any meaningful sense but more like retired people or those who live by "clipping coupons" on their investments.
Today's welfare programs in part are desperate efforts to compensate for inadequate institutions (lack of a social dividend) or perverse ones (minimum wage rules). But there is more to it than this. Some people whose incomes are above the socially acceptable minimum live in squalor because they do not spend their money wisely. Government's leverage here is limited. Others with more than minimum incomes may become destitute because bad circumstances (health problems, for example) call for an unusually high level of expenditures. In order to go on living, for example, a person may need a heart transplant costing hundreds of thousands of dollars, well beyond the means of even the average middle class American family.
This third type of poverty, poverty relative to desired or even strongly desired expenditures, exists in acute forms in the poorer countries. In India children commonly die from infections which could have been cured with $3 worth of antibiotics. Their families simply do not have the money. As technology progresses, this problem will increase. Before the antibiotics came in, American children did not enjoy the same advantage over Indian children, since antibiotics were not available in either country even for the children of the rich. Heart transplants were not an issue, no matter how much somebody might have benefited from one, until doctors learned how to do them.
If the occasions calling for extremely high expenditures are rare and distributed randomly, insurance techniques can minimize this third type of poverty, expenditure poverty. There is no particular reason why the insurance needs to be governmental, and when this is the case we can presume that it ought not to be governmental.
Although some people will not foresee the need for insurance against the small chance of a catastrophically large expenditure, government has no duty or special ability to protect people from their own short-sightedness. On the contrary, it is in the general interest to focus the consequences of shortsightedness precisely on the shortsighted, so as to encourage forethought. A more difficult question is posed by the fact that some people cannot afford to buy such insurance. Their incomes are limited, their other priorities more pressing. Eating today is more important than buying insurance against the bare possibility that one will need a heart transplant some day. While the plight of such people is disturbing, it does not follow that a taxpayer-subsidized welfare program is a desirable response. Even if there is to be a welfare program, it is not at all clear that it should take the form of heart transplant insurance. Assuming that the cost of such insurance is $100 per person per year, would all poor people prefer to receive the insurance, or would most opt for an extra $100 per year in cash that they could spend on things which they value more? To require them to take the subsidy in the form of insurance may allocate scarce resources in a way which does not maximize the satisfaction of the recipients.
Sometimes the problem is not just one of misallocating scarce resources. There are now medical techniques which would be useful to so many people that society as a whole cannot afford to pay for them for all individuals who need them and cannot pay for them personally. If people in general cannot afford something, it doesn't help to pay for it collectively rather than individually.
Government might better expend its limited resources on research to lower the cost of providing these services rather than on subsidizing them for those unable to pay. As costs fall, the service becomes more generally accessible. Government thereby can avoid "rationing" medical care, drawing the line on subsidy of specific treatments or persons, which is otherwise inevitable since "needs" are infinite but resources are always finite.
Welfare programs often provide short-term benefits which produce excessive long-term costs. In the short run we see people in perfectly dreadful circumstances who can be helped by expenditure of tax-paid resources. From the "micro" point of view, it is only the hard-hearted who could oppose the welfare program in question.. But in the long-run the welfare programs may create patterns of dependency and may help to multiply the very kinds of misery they were intended to ameliorate. Unemployment compensation may increase unemployment, aid to families with "dependent children" seems to encourage a profusion of single mothers, etc. It is just possible that such welfare programs must be rejected on principle in spite of the immediate pain that doing so would occasion.
A world government must avoid the excessive activity exhibited by national governments, but there may also be areas where national governments have not done enough. The most glaring example of a problem which has received insufficient attention is that of the environment.
Environmental problems only became acute when technological progress and population growth combined their effects in the twentieth century. Without modern technology, even extreme population growth would have threatened only a Malthusian crunch, not environmental disaster. As an exploding population pressed against the carrying capacity of the environment, mass starvation and poverty would have resulted, but the earth's ability to continue sustaining some life would not have been affected. Likewise, if earth's population had remained tiny even modern technology would not have been used on the scale needed to wreck the planet.
Even since the environment came under serious pressure, awareness of this fact was slow to develop. It is debatable just how widely concern about the environment has percolated in the world. Unlike the United States, where smoking is on the wane, in most parts of the world this practice remains undiminished. It is hard to get excited about pollution from the local factory when by smoking one in effect has a nose poked down the smokestack. And even genuine concern about the environment may be tempered by the short-term economic costs and side effects of protecting the environment for the long haul.
The main problem in getting adequate action to protect the world's environment, though, is that purely national governments are unable to do the job. Concerns about reducing the competitiveness of national industries relative to the rest of the world seriously impede effective regulatory actions. Protecting the environment by treaty suffers from high transaction costs and the impossibility of preventing some nations from refusing to sign.
A world government will have the universal jurisdiction needed to act effectively, public opinion will hopefully have become more aware of the problem, and the problem itself will have become more acute if world population continues to grow.
Environmental problems are intensified by population increases. Under given technological conditions, only a finite number of people can live on the planet. It is possible that, in order to avoid catastrophe, the world government will have to regulate the production of babies. (Instead of limiting reproduction, I suppose, the government could enforce an age limit, putting people to death when they reached the limit. However this would be an egregious violation of the rule of law, the principle that sanctions can be imposed on people only for violating a general rule of action. Any rule stated in terms of a person's age is, by definition, not general.)
Many government policies may affect reproduction. Tax structure, for example, may reward or penalize people who have children. If, unlike present U.S. policy, world government's taxes were higher for people with children, this would discourage large families.
The power of the pen may also have its place. An educational campaign could probably convince some people to hold down on the number of children they have. But this technique might increase the proportion of unconscientious people in the world over the long haul since the conscientious would have a smaller percentage of the babies.
Another way to hold down the birthrate might employ government's power of the purse. Some national governments have already experimented with paying a bounty to everybody undergoing voluntary surgical sterilization.
But what if these less extreme techniques are tried and found wanting? What if government must resort to its ultimate tool, the use of sanctions? Sanctions, to be legitimate, must be imposed only on people violating general rules of action. How can the world government act through laws to control total world population?
Necessarily, to limit population using a general rule, each couple must be allowed to have only the same number of children. But it is unlikely that desired population levels can be achieved if the limit is any integral number. One child per couple might be too low, while two might be too high. The limit would probably have to be set at some non- integer--perhaps 1.8 or some such figure--but it is not possible to have .8 of a baby, or .2 of one. King Solomon's offer to cut a disputed baby in half may be the earliest recorded recognition of this fact.
A government which did not respect the rule of law could simply set up an agency, require people having babies to get a license, and allow the agency total discretion to give out licenses when and only when it feels they serve the "public convenience and necessity." But the dangers of putting arbitrary control over this power of life (if not death) into any set of hands are self-evident.
We are assuming that the government's sole interest is in regulating the size of the population, not its "quality" (which would be another issue entirely). This being so, there are two approaches that do not place discretionary powers in bureaucratic hands. In either case, the government would first calculate how many babies per year or per couple will produce the desired population level. Then:
Approach 1: Government sells the indicated number of licenses each year on the open market at the natural price. (This is the price at which the quantity demanded--the number of licenses people are willing and able to buy at that price-- equals the available licenses, supply, the number of which is based on the government calculation.) A limited monopoly of the rights to have babies during the year is being auctioned off, and all receipts must benefit the public, the only owner of any monopoly. Therefore receipts must be placed in the trust fund and distributed via the social dividend.
Auctioning the limited rights to reproduce would hold the number of babies down to the determined level, assuming enforcement is possible. And it would do so without giving anybody dangerous power to make arbitrary case by case decisions. However even though the revenues generated by the auction are distributed equally to everybody, objections may be raised that the system discriminates against the right of the poor to have children, since even with their share of the dividend the poor may not be able to afford to buy a license.
Approach 2: Government can issue licenses good for, say, 1.8 children to each new couple, assuming it is the first marriage for each. Licenses not used can be sold at the market price; additional licenses can be bought in the same way. A poor couple can thus have one baby and may be able to purchase the .2 of a license needed to have a second. Or the couple can sell all or part of its license at the natural price, thus becoming less poor, if they would rather have the money or are unable to have children.
Enforcement could take many forms. Compulsory abortion might be imposed on persons becoming pregnant without a license. Or the government might hold back enough certificates to cover unlicensed children, but take them from their parents and subject both parents to sterilization. Or something might be put in the water supply to prevent pregnancy, and an antidote made available only to people with a proper license. No doubt many other techniques could be imagined, some of which might raise less serious ethical issues than those noted here. However enforcement is a problem no matter what the basis for allocating rights to have children,and hence is no basis for deciding among them.
How much government should there be? As little as possible! Of what government there is, how much of it should be the centralized world government? Again, as little as possible.
Government cannot be the remedy for all evil in the world. To identify some bad state of affairs does not automatically justify calling for government action to put things right. Not all good things need by done by a government. We need to take seriously Milton Friedman's "Eleventh Commandment" that we are all free to do good at our own expense.
It may be noble to sell all we own, acting as an individual, and give the proceeds to the poor. It is somewhat less than noble to force other people, through taxes imposed at the point of a sword, to support the poor. Max Weber was right: We need to remember the very special nature of government as an involuntary association, and to take into account how that fact has important implications for when and where governmental action appropriate. We need to remember St. Thomas Aquinas' advice that governmental treatment may be worse than the disease being attacked.
Cost-benefit analysis should be applied not only in deciding how government should deal with a problem, but also in deciding whether it should deal with the problem at all. Costs and risks must be considered as well as benefits. The long-run must be considered as well as the short-run.
The Metaconstitution is an effort to imagine an ideal government and an ideal society. But we are striving to see the best possible world, not the best impossible world. Hard reality still intrudes its sometimes ugly face. The Metaconstitution is not a utopia.
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