Knowledge And Decisions

The argument that the ability to vote to put political leaders out of office remains unimpaired by the growth of government is somewhat beside the point. Democracy is not simply the right to change political personnel, but the right to change policies. The reduced ability of the electorate to change policy is one of the consequences of growing government — and particularly of government whose power is growing most in its most insulated institutions, the federal courts and administrative agencies. The judicial and administrative nullification of congressional attempts to stop quotas and busing⁶⁵ are only the most striking contemporary examples. The undeclared war in Vietnam was another short-circuiting of public control over major national policy. Public opinion against leniency to criminals has had little effect, and the growing public support for capital punishment⁶⁶ has paralleled a growing outlawing of its use by the Supreme Court. Even policies nominally under the control of elected officials have gone counter to the philosophy of those officials. “Affirmative action” quotas and massive school busing both developed under the Nixon-Ford administrations which were opposed to them. So too did the rapid growth of federal welfare expenditures, which finally surpassed military expenditures under Nixon.⁶⁷ The substantive merits of these developments are not at issue here. The point is that this illustrates the increasing difficulty of public control of governmental policies, even with changes of officials, even at the highest elected levels.

None of this is historically unique. In the late stages of the Roman Empire its civil servants “felt able to exhibit a serene defiance of the emperor.”⁶⁸ Roman emperors had the power of life and death, but Roman bureaucrats knew how to run a vast empire that had grown beyond the effective control (or even knowledge) of any individual. The same was later true of Czarist Russia, for John Stuart Mill declared: “The Czar himself is powerless against the bureaucratic body; he can send any one of them to Siberia, but he cannot govern without them, or against their will.”⁶⁹ The experience of imperial China was very much the same.⁷⁰

Freedom to act in economic matters is neither a negligible kind of freedom in itself nor unrelated to other freedoms. The “McCarthy era” attacks on people associated with left-wing causes was primarily an attack or their jobs rather than any attempt to get direct government prohibitions or restrictions on what people could say or believe. Yet both sides recognized the high political stakes in this basically economic restriction. But even as regards issues where both the ends and the means are economic, freedom may yet be involved. When people living in homes and neighborhoods that pose no threat to themselves or others are forced to uproot themselves and scatter against their will, leaving their homes to be destroyed by bulldozers, they have lost freedom as well as houses and personal relationships. This loss of freedom would be no less real if it were justifiable by some national emergency (military action) or locally urgent conditions (epidemic). That it is more likely to be a result of some administrative agency’s preference for seeing a shopping mall where the neighborhood once stood only adds economic and sociological issues. It does not eliminate the issue of freedom. Indeed, serfdom itself was largely an economic relationship, but that did not prevent its disappearance from being a milestone in the development of freedom. The oft-noted political “cowardice” of big business corporations may in fact be prudence in light of the many costly processes through which government can run them. The constitutional protections against government punishment-by-processing (independent of ultimate verdicts) do not apply where economically punitive actions are not legally interpreted as punishments, or where administrative agencies can drain their time and money, subject neither to restrictions of impartial judiciary concepts nor to governmental bearing of burdens of proof. What is “euphemistically called social responsibility” may in fact be simply the “threat of law”⁷¹ — or of extralegal powers derived from institutions set up for entirely different purposes. For example, the Internal Revenue Service can (and has) threatened to revoke the tax-exempt status of organizations whose policies displease the government, even though such organizations violated no explicit statute. In addition, political hostility to philanthropic foundations found expression in the 1969 Tax Reform Act which both drained and constrained the use of foundations’ financial resources.⁷²