Diagnostics and Therapeutics in Political Economy
From The Independent Institute
Since the early 1980s, I have been lecturing on the growth of government to a wide variety of audiences. In academic seminars and workshops, professors typically ask questions about my explanatory framework, my evidence, alternative explanations, possible counterexamples, and so forth. But when I speak to a friendly lay audience, the first question is typically something along the lines of, “What can we do to turn this thing around?” Academic people, who are accustomed to discussing all sorts of political and economic developments, many of which are none too savory, usually have the ability to distance themselves from any revulsion they may feel about the matters under discussion and to concentrate on how one might best explain the events in question. In social science, “value freedom” is upheld as a standard for the analyst. Market-friendly nonacademic people, in contrast, are often surprised, and appalled, to discover how much the government has grown and many of the means by which political actors have enlarged it, and their immediate orientation is toward action to reverse what they perceive to be a pernicious development. Thus, they bring normative and programmatic concerns directly to the fore. Like Lenin, they demand to know, “What is to be done?”
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Thanks for a beautifully written post, Dr. Higgs.
As a citizen of a much more statist country than the US (Russia), I am still dismayed at the direction in which the US people is going.
I think that only a huge economic and political crisis may (but not necessarily will) reverse the statist trend. Maybe, that moment will come when the US Social Security system, Medicare and Medicaid finally go bankrupt.
But miracles happen sometimes. One bright spot in the world is Georgia, a small country in the Caucasus that is on the verge of an unprecedented move in human history. It is on the verge of constitutionally protecting economic freedom to fix the enormous economic liberalization that has taken place since 2004. See here.