Article published in The Gazette, November 19, 2001, p. A-17
Voter turnout was low in the last Montreal elections. Within the span of two years, two dozen municipalities will have disappeared from the island. It has become difficult to vote in a municipal election if you are not already on the provincial voters list. You have to show government ID. Add the fact that electoral propaganda and competition, at all levels of government, are now severely regulated and restricted by gag laws and controls on party financing.
A common thread runs through all these facts, which is put into sharp focus by the theories of Anthony de Jasay, a contemporary economist born in Hungary and living in France, who has produced an important scientific work in English. Although he is not a household name, de Jasay may well be remembered as one of the most creative economists of the 20th century.
De Jasay's work is concerned with the economic analysis of political processes. His most famous book, published in 1985, is The State. To understand de Jasay's model of the state, one must get attuned to a major discovery of the modern school of economics called Public Choice. The idea is that individuals don't change from nasty egoists to altruistic angels when they walk from the market to the public sector; they remain the same, that is, mainly interested in their own advancement and satisfaction.
Once we drop the naïve assumption that the state is angelically pursuing the public good and discover that it is an institution manned by ordinary people with ordinary motivations but backed by a monopoly of force, many implications follow. Consider De Jasay's model.
The state's main activity is to coercively redistribute money and other advantages from some individuals to others. It takes from Peter and gives to Paul. It forces one to behave in ways that the other prefers. The only difference between an autocratic and a democratic state is that, in the former, redistribution goes from the people to the autocrat and his court while in the latter, it goes from some part of the people to some other part (hopefully a majority, but not always).
In fact, to maintain popular support, an autocrat will redistribute some of his loot to part of the populace. Redistribution under the Roman emperors was summarized by "panem et circences," which means bread and games, not Bombardier subsidies and Loto-Québec scratch-and-wins. Or is there a difference? The difference is that, in a democratic state, "the people" are officially the ones who decide who gets what part of the big jackpot of the state.
This difference leads to crucial consequences. Since the loot is there for the taking, you better get your hands into the public treasury before your neighbour does. Pressure groups form to get their shares, and the more one gets, the more another wants. Of course, the taxpayer gets squeezed. He can't change the system, but he can get compensating subsidies or other advantages.
As the redistributive system grows, many people end up being on both sides of the wicket. It is generally impossible to calculate whether a given social group steals more or less than it is being stolen from. The process is called "fiscal churning": in OECD countries, it is estimated that 40 per cent of public expenditures go to the very individuals who have financed them.
In a more direct way, the state redistributes advancement and satisfaction coercively by meddling with lifestyles. It enforces laws against some minorities - smokers, milk consumers, gun owners, English speakers, drug users and so on - in order to satisfy other groups. The more the state coerces, the more its victims ask for its help in order to get even. The state is led to oblige by political competition between incumbents and would-be rulers.
General frustration is the result. Citizens appear to want both more expenditures and less taxes, more government intervention and more autonomy.
Political competition, instead of overpoliticization, comes to be seen as the problem. The statocrats will not say it this way. They will say that there is too much decentralization and fragmentation, that political speech must not be unbalanced, that voting fraud must be controlled and so forth. The overgoverned appear ungovernable, and the easiest solution, from the state's viewpoint, is to restrict political competition.
This can be done in a number of ways. One is to surreptitiously restrict the voting franchise by making it more costly (if only in terms of dignity) for opponents to state power to vote or to run in elections. Another way is to undermine local autonomy, through subsidization and regulation of municipalities by the state. A more direct way, which few states dare to use, is simply to abolish municipalities.
As de Jasay concludes, "having gathered all power to itself, (the state) has become the sole focus of all conflict, and it must construct totalitarian defences to match its total exposure."