POLITICS:
In Praise of Gridlock

By Tibor R. Machan

A do-nothing Congress? How sweet the sound. By Tibor Machan.

The idea is that the more the politicians squabble among themselves in Washington, Sacramento, or other centers of government power, the better the chance people have for carrying on with their own lives as they deem proper. That is, after all, the point of human communities: to be able to live peacefully on your own terms and those terms you can arrange with others. The proper role of lawmakers and law enforcers is to secure that peace, to make sure our individual rights aren’t violated. The details may get complicated, but that’s the bottom line.

Given that neither of the major political parties has any interest in facilitating this limited purpose for us—because now they all want to meddle with nearly every part of our lives and are often encouraged to do this by the very people whose lives they interfere with so much (in the hope that perhaps the meddling will favor them as opposed to others)—what is there left to hope for from politics?

Gridlock.

When the power-hungry politicians are not in sync because they can’t agree on how to use their power over us, they get preoccupied with jockeying for power. If one party is in charge of the whole shebang, haggling is reduced and the likelihood of messing up our lives is greater.

Nancy Pelosi and President Bush by Taylor Jones for the Hoover Digest.

As everyone saw during the six or so years of Republican control of the presidency and Congress, those folks were just as eager as those they kept calling “tax and spend liberals” to, well, tax and spend. Sure, some temporary tax relief was provided, but with all the spending that these hypocritical Republicans supported, sometime in the near future the jig will be up. (Moreover, it is pretty rotten to violate the notion that there should not be taxation without representation, which is exactly what funding government by borrowing money boils down to.)

Republicans and Democrats alike are caught in the spiral of public-choice theory, refusing to say no to anything on which they can spend your money and mine, given that we have no systematic block against it in our legal system. (My friend Jack Wheeler says this ought to be the next big arena of political debate, the erection of constitutional barriers to confiscatory taxation. Dream on, Jack—they all think they somehow can square the circle.)

So the only hope that’s reasonable and promising is for the politicians to get completely immersed in infighting. Let the Bush team strive to increase the military budget, and let Nancy Pelosi & Co. fight him tooth and nail. And let Pelosi & Co. try for more money for whatever interest group they want to benefit, and get the Republicans up in arms about that. And let’s have more of the same on as many fronts as possible—extending government regulations, installing more environmental precautionary measures, promoting religion in public schools, whatever.

If one party is in charge of the whole show, haggling is reduced, and the likelihood of messing up our lives is greater.

Then, if we are lucky, we will get some additional scandals from the new team running the legislative side of the Nanny State, which will add more obstacles to their getting anything done. (They all seem to think that the most important part of their job is to “get something done,” whatever that “something” happens to be, even if it means adding a bunch of intrusive laws into our lives.)

Thus the positive thing about gridlock is the chance that it will slow down the runaway train of government intrusion in people’s lives. Perhaps that will provide a chance for people to better understand what the American founders tried to teach them about the proper scope of governmental power. The lesson is that such power is justified only when used defensively, to ward off violations of our basic rights. The rest is tantamount to nothing less than political malpractice.

Copublished by Rowman & Littlefield and the Hoover Press is Confirmation Wars: Preserving Independent Courts in Angry Times, by Benjamin Wittes. To order, call 800.462.6420 or visit www.rowmanlittlefield.com.

Tibor R. Machan is a Hoover research fellow, professor emeritus of philosophy at Auburn University, and holds the R. C. Hoiles Endowed Chair in Business Ethics and Free Enterprise at the Argyros School of Business & Economics, Chapman University.