Jeffrey Tucker  – Saturday, December 10, 2016 – at FEE

Do you notice a pattern when dealing with any aspect of the government at nearly any level? We all have. Experience shows that if something is going to go really wrong, predictably waste your time, annoy you and attack your dignity, and finally just prove to be totally ineffective at accomplishing the task, there’s a good chance that it involves the government. This is one of the most persistent and yet least acknowledged features of modern life.

At best, government does necessary things poorly.There is a certain cast of mind at work here. I’ve written that government as we know it has a toxic personality. Below is my attempt to frame it up and identify the main personality traits of the “administrative state,” that is the modern public sector that, in principle, knows no limits to the range of its power.

Society outside the state has corrective forces always at work. Life’s not perfect but it is generally trying its best to improve. The market and the voluntary order have within them structures that keep human vice and relentless failure from completely taking over the system.

That’s not true with the government. The government builds protective walls around itself that prohibit inputs that would otherwise keep faulty thinking at bay. Things seem stuck in a pattern of failure at every level. At best, government does necessary things poorly. Often it does unintelligent things. At worst, it does unspeakably horrible things.

Some quick examples from everyone’s favorite example of government annoyance: the TSA. Lots of people are deeply offended by the TSA’s groping gruffness. More striking, however, is its sheer incompetence at its assigned task, its lack of concern for anything but the existing plan, and the disconnect between the goal of security and the actual reality.

But the TSA is hardly unique in this respect. It just so happens that more people encounter it more often than most any other government agency. Yes, it makes everyone crazy. But we would experience the same absurdities if every day we had to deal with the Department of Labor, the Pentagon, the Department of Transportation, or Housing and Urban Development. Those who do can tell you amazing stories!

Here’s the deal. The state’s distinguishing characteristic is its presumption of control and its use of force to exercise that control. But this is not the whole of the problem with statism. This characteristic gives rise to many other features that are part of what we might call a statist way of thinking. It really amounts to a pattern of being that comes with power, which is to say, that comes with the absence of any check or corrective consequences.

So what are the features of this faulty way of thinking that seems pervasive in government institutions? Relying on my usual influences (Nock, Hazlitt, Read, Mises, Rothbard, Hayek), let us explore how you too can think like a state.

1. Presume that all things worth knowing are already known. That includes the goal and the means to achieve the goal. The state thinks that society should work a certain way and assume a predetermined shape, and it knows this with absolute certainty. There is no process, no unfolding of history that yields unexpected results. The state is so certain of the end point of the social order that it never has to explain or justify its perception.

There is no arrogance in the world like the state’s arrogance.It knows the right allocation of income between classes, the right size and number of businesses in each sector, the right allocation between security and risk, what is just and what is unjust, what is and is not fair. It knows when the economy is growing too much or too little. It knows what industries should die or last forever. It knows what is and is not good for you.

Because there is no uncertainty in the statist mind, there is no need for discovery, improvisation, or imagination that reveals itself through time through trial and error. There is no need for listening, learning, adapting. What’s more, a state doesn’t doubt that it has the means to achieve its goals. To will it is to cause it happen. Its omniscience comes with omnipotence.

This is why there is no arrogance in the world like the state’s arrogance. At the same time, any person or any institution can adopt this regrettable habit of mind: managers, parents, pastors, business professionals. Outside the state and the protections it builds around itself, however, reality eventually strikes back. Reality is about uncertainty, change, surprise, innovation, adaptation. Markets give life to these forces in the same way that the state absolutely and by necessity pretends they do not exist.

2. Presume that the path to victory is paved by enforcement. This is a feature of the statist way of thinking that is most on display in wartime. Is the war causing more people to join the rebel ranks? The answer is more shock and awe! If that doesn’t work, bring out the tanks, the bigger guns, larger bullhorns, and more troops on the ground.

The harsher the punishment, the more the deterrence, or so believes the state.It goes without saying that there is nothing wrong with the state’s plan, so the only problem here is that people are being insufficiently deferential to the rightful authority. There is only one way forward: show people who is boss.

This is not only in wartime. Every agency of government thinks this way. You see it in the penal laws. If something is bad like drugs or underage drinking, the answer seems obvious: increase the penalties for those caught. No punishment is too harsh. The harsher the punishment, the more the deterrence, or so believes the state. In the same way, there can never be too many police, too many people charged with making other people comply.

But might this path create unintended consequences? Might the enforcement be causing the problem to get worse and create blowback, backlash, and black markets? Or might harshness recruit more people into the rebel class and discourage law keeping? In the state’s way of thinking, this is not possible. The laws and the regulations are the voices of god, period, and god is never wrong. Certainly this god never, under any circumstances, admits error.

3. Presume that all disagreement amounts to betrayal and treason. This point follows directly from the above two. If you know all things and all things are possible through enforcement, it stands to reason that should someone dare to pop up his or her head and take issue, this person is an enemy of the state or whatever the state stands for.

There are only two possible archetypes of the good citizen: the serf and the sycophant.You are against the war? Then you are for the enemy and defying the rightful authority. You have doubts about the endless looting of private wealth and the regimentation of human interaction? You are part of the problem instead of the solution…. read more here