Letters from an Ohio Farmer

Progressives and Regressives

To My French Friend:

You raise lots of good questions, Jean-Luc, about my previous letter on the speeches of Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Barack Obama at Osawatomie.  For the moment, let me comment on just one.  

I think you are right to say that Mr. Obama drew a false parallel in his speech, when he compared himself to Roosevelt as he did.  Just as Roosevelt argued that the government had to have more power to counter the centralization in corporations of the wealth and power created by the industrial revolution, so did Obama argue that the government required yet more power to counter the centralization in corporations of the wealth and power created by the information revolution, the more recent transformation the President acknowledged our economy has gone through.  

The problem with this parallel is that the two revolutions are very different—in fact, they are opposed—in their effects.   Corporations centralized power during the industrial revolution because it was the most efficient way to get their work done.  All decisions, all actions require information.  Manufacturing a product requires thousands of decisions, for example, about raw materials, design, marketing, and many other things.  Getting the information to make those decisions is costly.  Bringing all those decisions and the processes they make possible under central control in a corporation reduces those costs.  Furthermore, when dealing with a mass of less skilled workers a hundred years ago, it made sense to give them simple tasks and to centralize control over them by giving them rules and regulations that they had to follow in carrying out those tasks.  The information revolution is changing all this. 

Consider your own situation.  You design and can manage industrial control systems for corporations around the world from France because the internet connects you to thousands of sensors that automatically feed you information.  The cost of gathering the information you need to decide and act on a problem in a California plant is a fraction of what it would have been even a few decades ago for the plant itself to do that work.  And you can do it more cheaply than they can because you can do it for many others at the same time.  Furthermore, you and your colleagues are skilled.  The company in California does not need to give you detailed rules on how to do your work.  In fact, such rules would make you less useful and productive.  They merely tell you what they want and they leave it to you to figure out how to do it.  The information revolution means that corporations can and need to decentralize, to disperse their power and authority. 

The administrative state of rules and regulations that Theodore Roosevelt championed was a response to industrialization.  The industrial age is ending, as the President himself acknowledged.  Shouldn’t the administrative state be ending as well then?  Instead, the President proposes more rules and regulations.  

Everywhere we look, whether the streets of Cairo or New York City, offices in France or family rooms in America, the information revolution is putting more information and thus more power into the hands of individuals.  Everywhere that is but in the minds of people like the President who acknowledge that our case is new, but who cannot think or act anew.  It is striking how backward looking, how trapped in the past so-called progressives are.   I agree with you that they should be called regressives. 

It is true, of course, that the transfer of power to individuals that I just spoke of will never be complete.  Neither you nor I are arguing for some kind of absolute individualism.  As I noted in my previous letter, we acknowledge, for example, that governmental action is necessary to ensure that none have unfair advantage.  But this does not mean that government action and power must always be the same or must always grow.  Given the information revolution, the transformation that the President acknowledged, our real task is not to keep building up the centralized industrial age bureaucracy but to figure out what aspects of that bureaucracy we can do without and what might need to be preserved but changed. 

The transformation we are going through has the potential to enhance human freedom, but while the President acknowledges the transformation, he does not acknowledge its potential.  At Osawatomie, he presented it not as an opportunity but as a problem that only government could fix.  If Jefferson were alive today, I think he would see this potential for freedom as he once saw such potential in America’s abundant land.  Living on one's own land, Jefferson thought, was the best way to ensure that citizens would live free and be safe in the enjoyment of what they labored to achieve.  Our circumstances have changed.  The age of the family farm has passed for most of us.  But the age-old longing for freedom and justice that Jefferson sought to satisfy can find fulfillment still, I believe, in the new forms made possible by the latest transformation of our lives.  Indeed, that transformation can give fresh life to individual liberty.  We should not let it be smothered in rules, regulations, and thinking suited to a by-gone era. 

There is more to say about all this, Jean-Luc, as you know, and I look forward to our future correspondence.

Ohio Farmer

 

Civility and Powers

To the Members of the 112^th Congress:

"Civility" has been a word to conjure with for the past few weeks. Since the terrible killings and woundings in Tucson, Americans could hardly open a newspaper or turn on a television without someone shouting at us most uncivilly in the name of civility. In the name of making us all friends, "civility" is wielded as a cudgel would be wielded against hated enemies. The word is deployed as a weapon, the way "bipartisanship" has sometimes been deployed in the service of the most narrow and unseemly partisanship.

Citizens' eyes roll and glaze over at such unserious and trumped up scolding. But civility is a serious theme. We want civility in our civil discourse because, in the language of the founders, we want reason and not passion to govern our affairs. We insist that we will be ruled by the consent of the people, and we are aware at the same time that the people can become a mob. And so, as the last letter observed, we have devised "constitutional ways of constructing and shaping the authoritative consent of the people" so that the "cool and deliberate sense of the community" might prevail in our political deliberations.

Among the constitutional devices intended to help achieve this difficult and desirable result, separation of powers ranks high. This idea, "that the legislative, executive and judiciary departments ought to be separate and distinct," is (let us hope!) familiar to every American eighth grader; let us even be so immodest as to say that it is an essential American contribution to the advancement of constitutional governance.  Separation of powers was so important to the founders that they thought, in James Madison's words, that "[t]he accumulation of all powers legislative, executive and judiciary in the same hands . . . may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny." But I won't rehearse here what (I trust) we all have learned on the subject from fondly remembered grammar school teachers.

In the spirit of renewed attention to the Constitution that distinguishes this Congress, I will hope merely to observe something that may not be quite so obvious and may have a bearing on Congress's response to current challenges. Put simply, in our Constitution the branches are separate, but they are not equal: the vast preponderance of federal authority is delegated to Congress, which is without question the preeminent branch under the Constitution.  One reason this may not be as obvious as it should be just by reading the Constitution is that, over the last fifty years, the separation of powers has tilted a bit out of constitutional balance. The presidential and judicial branches have become assertive and bold in articulating the national agenda, and Congress has largely deferred to this (or to the bureaucracy), sometimes in an effort to avoid difficult or potentially unpopular actions. Think of the fact that we call the recent historic elections "midterm" elections, as if Congress is a sideshow and the Presidency is the main event.

In our Constitution, Congress is the main event, and our separation of powers will serve us better if Congress is not as deferential as it has become accustomed to being (whether to the executive, the judiciary, or the bureaucracy). Let Congress reassert the lawmaking preeminence and responsibility intended for it in the Constitution--initiating constitutional conversations, setting out an agenda which is not necessarily the President's or the Court's, overturning what the members may consider to be the wayward actions of the other branches--and our constitutional deliberations as a whole will benefit.

I hasten to add, lest "irrational exuberance" seize the day, that when Congress acts boldly and takes the legislative initiative the Constitution intends for it to take, members should do so on behalf of their constitutional duty and not for mere party advantage, and they (and we) should hope and expect to find that the executive branch and the judiciary will rise to resist any assertions that seem to them unacceptable, behaving just as is intended in the Constitutional design. This proper functioning of the separation of powers (aided by the checks and balances within Congress) is meant to impede the misuse of Congressional power. We and Congress will display a kind of constitutional wisdom and patience, I think, if we recognize that the power to resist misuses of Congressional power is also a power that might on occasion thwart the necessary and proper uses of Congressional power.

More generally speaking, if separation of powers is designed to impede the rash introduction of radical change, it also has the effect of making it difficult to undo such change. If this Congress thinks it is its duty to do just that, let it act and give its reasons. It will meet resistance, and we all should expect that reasons will be given in turn. This is our Constitution at work. Citizens should anticipate serious argument, not just about policies, but about rights and duties, about the powers of government and limitations on those powers.  We should all learn from this, and all of this, of course, takes time.  And if our elected representatives can't sort it out, then the people, through the ballot box, will speak again, and a new constitutional deliberation, possibly with different participants, will begin.

A final word:  No constitutional devices like separation of powers--none of these "inventions of prudence," as Publius called them--will bring civility or cool and deliberate reflection from a nation of savages. So our broader constitutional deliberations should include not just civility but all the virtues, capacities, and principles that must shape the character of a people if they mean, as we do mean, to be self governing. Among the themes to include in these deliberations is the civic friendship, the care for one another, even in our millions, that could not be missed when the news of the Tucson tragedies spread across the land.

Ohio Farmer