Knowledge And Decisions

As the legislative and executive branches of government demarcate the boundaries of private decision making, so the courts have confined the scope of the government’s activities. Constitutional guarantees encumber the state precisely so that the state may not encumber the citizen. Imposing outsiders’ rules to supersede insiders’ understanding and flexibility is questionable even as social policy, aside from its constitutional problems. When something similar was suggested for the Supreme Court itself, in the modest form of a case prescreening panel to reduce its work load, the institutional needs of the court were expressed in terms which go to the heart of what the court’s own decisions have done to other institutions across the country. According to Justice Brennan, “flexibility would be lost”⁴⁰⁷ in an “inherently subjective” process⁴⁰⁸ with “intangible factors”⁴⁰⁹ that are “more a matter of ‘feel’ than of precisely ascertainable facts,”⁴¹⁰ and which involve a “delicate interplay” of “discretionary forces.”⁴¹¹ The tragedy is that he apparently considered this to be an institutional peculiarity of the Supreme Court,⁴¹² rather than a pervasive fact of decision making in general.

Chapter 10 Trends in Politics

Among the prominent political currents of the twentieth century are (1) a worldwide growth in the size and scope of government, (2) the rise of ideological politics, and (3) the growing political role of intellectuals. In addition, it has been an “American century” in terms of the growing role of the United States on the world stage, particularly during two world wars and in the nuclear age. This does not imply that international events have followed an American blueprint or have even been favorable on the whole to American interests or desires. It does imply that the fate of the United States has become of world historic, rather than purely national, significance. These developments will be considered here in terms of their implications for the effective use of knowledge in social processes, and in terms of the even more important question of their implications for human freedom.

THE SIZE AND SCOPE OF GOVERNMENT

SIZE

By almost any index, government has grown in size and in the range of its activities and powers over the past century, throughout the Western world. This has been true of governments at all levels, but particularly of central or national government. In the United States, there were less than half a million civilian employees of the federal government as late as the onset of World War I, but there are now more than six times that number,¹ and even this understates the growth of the federal payroll, because “most government activities are carried out by workers who are not included in the federal employment statistics”² — employees of federal contractors or subcontractors, and state and local programs financed and controlled from Washington. In addition, “about one person in every four in the U.S. population receives workless pay from government sources”³ — relief, unemployment compensation, and innumerable benefits of various other social programs. The expenditures of the federal government in 1975 were more than double what they were in 1965, and these in turn were nearly twice what they were in 1955.⁴ To compare this with pre-New Deal expenditure patterns, 1975 federal spending was more than one hundred times federal spending in 1925.⁵ Moreover, the budget of HEW alone is roughly equal to that of all fifty state governments combined.⁶

One of the problems in trying to comprehend federal spending is that the units involved — billions of dollars — are so large as to be almost meaningless to many citizens. To visualize what a billion dollars means, imagine that some organization had been spending a thousand dollars a day every day since the birth of Christ. They would not yet have spent a billion dollars.⁷ In the year 2000 they would still be more than 250 million dollars short of one billion dollars. Government agencies of course spend not one but many billions of dollars annually. HEW alone spends about 182 billion dollars annually.⁸ To get a figure comparable to what the entire federal government spends annually, change the one thousand dollars per day to half a million dollars per day, every day since the birth of Christ. At the end of two thousand years the grand total would amount to less than three quarters of what the federal government spent in 1978 alone.

The size of government has grown, not simply by doing more of the same things but by expanding the scope of what it does. At the extreme of this development, a new political phenomenon has made its appearance in the twentieth century — the totalitarian state. Undemocratic, despotic, or tyrannical governments have existed down through the ages, but the totalitarian state is more than this.