Brink Lindsey: The Dead End of Small Government

A center-right party in America no longer exists, one whose primary values are (small government, fiscal responsibility, family values, personal responsibility), and that sees the importance of actual governance.

In his essay posted at the Niskanen Center, Brink Lindsey, traces through how this came about. "Deep-seated intellectual errors" of the Ludwig von Mises/Ayn Rand/Murray Rothbard/F. A. Hayek/the Chicago School of Economics meet the American society with its particular politics and history, and: 

 Here then is what the ideals of free markets and limited government have come to stand for after small-government ideology was filtered through American political realities for a few decades: 

•  A dogmatic attachment to tax cuts, especially tax cuts for the rich, as the appropriate response to virtually any conceivable circumstance; 
• A strong pro-business, as opposed to pro-market, tilt on regulation, too often attacking needed pro-market regulations because they impose costs on business while ignoring anti-market regulations that benefit favored constituencies; 
• A focused hostility toward government efforts to help the poor, pursued with much greater vigor than any opposition to subsidies for the middle class and rich or government policies that injure the poor; 
• A general aversion to government transfer payments that has resulted, not in significant reductions in social spending, but in the redirection of social spending through tax preferences to provide lopsided benefits for the well-off;
•  Incessant bashing of the public sector and public service as inherently dysfunctional and dangerous, while attention to how public policy might actually make Americans’ lives better has dwindled toward zero.

 This is actually existing small-government conservatism, and it is not a pretty picture. I know this is not what a lot of smart and talented libertarian and free-market intellectuals and activists stand for personally. This certainly wasn’t what I saw myself standing for during the more than two decades I worked as a professional libertarian at the Cato Institute. But as libertarians are always fond of reminding us, good intentions aren’t enough. Efforts to influence politics must ultimately be judged by their consequences, not their motives, and the fruits of libertarian anti-statism have grown rancid and unhealthy. 

 This is the diagnosis of the problem and description of its symptoms. In other essays, Lindsey talks about the intellectual remedy to this problem. Before the election, I had hoped that there was a strong rejection of Trump that would lead the Republican Party towards this resolution. Instead Trump won about ten million more voters than he did in 2016; he won more votes in a Presidential election than anyone not named Biden. But Brink Lindsay's essays should be read anyway in this suggested order.

1. The Poverty of Natural Rights Libertarianism. 
2. The Dead End of Small Government 
3. Free Markets and Limited Government Reconceived.

To egg you along, here's where he is headed:

When we see that markets work best, not in the absence of government but in the presence of good government, we are able to see the ideals of free markets and limited government in a new and clearer light. Freeing those vital principles from the misunderstandings created by libertarian ideology, we can reconceive them so that they serve, rather than undermine, the cause of effective government on which our freedom and prosperity depend. 

Thus reconceived, the concept of “free markets” is no longer associated with the overall size and scope of government. Rather, the “free” in “free markets” describes certain key attributes of a well-functioning market system. Markets are free, not when they are unregulated, but when the rules that define them allow for wide freedom of action along a number of key dimensions: free entry, free exit, freely moving prices, free trade across national boundaries, freedom to hire and fire, freedom to take a job or quit, freedom to introduce new products or production methods without prior permission, and freedom to invest. The commitment to free markets is based on evidence, not ideology....