The Oppression Curve
Government isn't a good/bad binary
There is a certain binary thinking about government that has infected both sides of the political spectrum.
On the left, government is good. Yes, governments collude with money to censor, corrupt, exploit, and dominate. But if some government is bad, more will be, uh… better. Somehow. I guess.1
More to the point, on the right, government is bad. It is bad at every level and people who get into government are bad. This is a terrible error that has led to a generation of Ron Swanson Republicans.
Power doesn’t come with a side of bacon?
Terrified to wield power, disdainful of their own people in government, and spiteful of the very idea of the state, this misguided libertarianism2 has cost the right the Culture War for at least a generation. While the left has Long Marched through institution after institution, we’ve congratulated ourselves on losing with dignity. We don’t get a say at the city council, but at least we have the time back for Conservative hobbies.
THE OPPRESSION CURVE
I propose another way of thinking about the problem. Inspired by the Laffer Curve’s recognition that tax rates and tax revenues are non-linear, the Oppression Curve suggests that the relationship between government and the freedom of the governed is similarly non-linear.
The definitions for these axes are fuzzy at this point. Prosperity can include financial concerns, but isn’t limited to them. It also includes things like reproductive success, safety from crime, ownership or other stake in the system, and intangibles like happiness and a feeling of stability. Likewise, Size of Government could be any number of things - number of laws, government share of GDP, number of police, or concentration of power.
The precise shape of the curve is also indefinite. The peak, which I call the Roosevelt point3, could be further left, with a narrower range of prosperous government arrangements, or further right, with a longer ramp up to tyranny. I’ve done zero math on this and there’s no specific, quantitative reason to believe the curve is parabolic.
These particulars can be hammered out later. For now, consider the extremes to get an intuitive sense of the nature of the curve.
On the far left, without any government, you have a nice little farm in a dell. You don’t have to follow any rules or pay any taxes. You eat everything you grow and raise and are master of your own domain. Until it gets rolled by barbarians. Then you die or live the rest of your short life as a slave.
On the far right4, with totalitarian government, you have nothing. You follow every rule and pay all of your income to the collective. You aren’t allowed to grow anything and you spend your days in breadlines. Until a stray comment gets you sent to the gulag. Then you die or live the rest of your short life as a slave.
At the Roosevelt point, you live in a State. You follow some rules and pay some non-trivial taxes. You may grow something, start a business, or maybe even take up soldiering. You don’t always like the rules, but you really, probably will not die prematurely of violence by state or non-state actors.
CHANGING THE DEBATE
Once we can agree on the basic existence of the Oppression Curve, we can change the way we think about state power.
We can recognize the power, majesty, and potential of government. We can recruit our A players into power structures that reward and recognize them for their contributions. We can tell compelling stories about why we deserve power and what we will do with it.
We can do these things without giving up on the idea that if we go too far, the results will be bad for the people we serve.
We can debate the shape of the curve. We can debate where we are on the curve. Personally, I think we’re roughly here:
We’ve past the point where government was optimally-sized5 and are rapidly headed toward gulags, anarchotyranny, or other abusive state treatment. We need to be back in charge or, at least, back in the room to arrest and reverse the direction of travel.
I am not the first person on the right to suggest we need to get more comfortable with state power. In certain circles, that is already taken for granted. But for the sake of building coalitions and selling a vision, hopefully this is a useful arrow to have in the quiver. What do you think?
Ironically, this at least implies a non-linear relationship and is closer in theory to the point of this article than the base right-wing framework.
Before you @ me about libertarianism, I do mean “misguided.” I recognize that basically no libertarian framework formally amounts to “government = bad,” but this is often the casual and cultural takeaway for the less-philosophically inclined.
Based on the idea that, in the US, it was under FDR’s regime where we clearly passed this point with the New Deal and WWII structures like the OSS and MIC that would gradually be turned inward. I also considered Wilson, Lincoln, and even Hamilton. If you’ve got a good case to make one way or the other, I’ll let you guest-post it here.
Er, left. No, right, but just… on the graph. I really tried to come up with a way to make “left” equal more government, but danged if almost everyone isn’t used to the x-axis going up left to right.
This could be contextual. The curve doesn’t have to be fixed. Part of the reason I chose Roosevelt was the failure of the US to appropriately downsize government functions post-WWII.
The thing that we Swansons hate about government is that it *always* grows and *always* moves beyond its intended purpose almost immediately. So even if we could set things at that magic Roosevelt point, in a year we'd be shifted significantly to the right. This is why we make the extreme statements that we do. It's like trying to squat 900 pounds. We probably won't get there, but we may hit a more reasonable goal as a by product.
A start, but needs refinement. A government which spends tax dollars hunting down escaped slaves is different from a government which spends tax dollars building highways.
Liberty is not a pure function of amount of government. It is also a function of what the government does.
Where there is a great deal of unity, for example, socialism can provide cost savings due to economies of scale. The U.S. Postal Service was created on that principle. Some towns have "free" internet service paid via government on this principle as well. Cheaper to hook everyone up than to pay marketing expenses and worry about freeloaders using their neighbor's bandwidth.
(There are dangers in the reasoning above, of course. That free Internet service could become government surveillance, etc. But as recent history shows, private companies can get into the surveillance game as well.)
And no, this comment does not have any concrete policy recos. I'm just musing out loud.