Knowledge And Decisions

Over the years, but especially in the twentieth century, the constitutional division of powers has been eroded or destroyed in a number of ways. The intentional combination of the constitutionally-divided legislative, executive, and judicial powers in administrative agencies is only one of these ways, though perhaps the most blatant. The Civil War and its aftermath for generations set up federal-state confrontations in which “states’ rights” were almost invariably interwoven with racial oppressions increasingly rejected by the country at large. The preservation of the historic division of powers has been dependent upon the interpretation of the Constitution by a Supreme Court which itself stands to benefit from the concentration of power in the federal government, and by extending judicial power into executive and legislative areas. Moreover, the sheer growth in size of the federal government has given it new powers derived neither from the Constitution nor from any statutes, but inherent in the disposition of vast sums of money, many important jobs, and great discretionary powers of enforcing a massive and ever growing amount of laws and regulations. Finally, the ideologizing of politics has made the preservation of the constitutional framework a matter of reduced importance in the face of passionately felt urgencies. These various forces can be summed up as the moral and the institutional reasons for the erosion of the constitutional divisions of power.

How does the sheer size of government affect constitutional democracy or freedom? First of all, the size of the government affects the ability of the citizens to monitor what it does — or even the ability of their elected political surrogates to monitor the activities of a far-flung administrative empire, with officials who may dispose of sums of money greater than the gross national products of many nations. The congressional committee system attempts to cope with the problem by assigning a segment of each house to concentrate on particular policy issues — banking and currency, the military, labor, etc. — and make reports to the full Senate or House of Representatives, to guide the votes of individual members. However, as the government has expanded the scope of its activities, each Senator or Representative has to serve on so many committees and subcommittees (about ten subcommittees per Senator, for example⁵¹) dealing with matters of such complexity that no unaided individual could stay abreast of it all. This in turn means that political surrogates themselves are forced to resort to other surrogates — their staff aides, whose influence is so pervasive that they have been referred to as a second set of lawmakers.⁵² Committee staffs do not simply acquire factual information; they influence the substance and thrust of legislation, and often write its provisions. The high cost of knowledge also adds weight to lobbyists for special interests, who have incentives to become knowledgeable in a narrow but often complex area. Like the committee staffs and lobbyists, career bureaucrats owe much of their influence to the high cost of knowledge. The career bureaucrats both write and interpret federal regulations, which in 1975 occupied more than 60,000 pages of the Federal Register — three times the number of pages in 1970.⁵³ In short, escalating knowledge costs reduce the representativeness of government. There are also huge financial costs of government programs, which tend to be argued over in terms of their individual merits or demerits, without regard to their effect on the size and responsiveness of government.